RFID World Asia 2006

A couple of months back, I attended the 3rd annual RFID World Asia 2006 exhibition, from 26 to 28 April 2006 at Suntec Singapore, mooted as Asia’s most established and leading RFID technology event. Somehow I felt that the actual numbers of RFID exhibitors have dwindled over the past three years.

Our company has been one of our business partners with Omron, a global leader in RFID products. But we have not been concentrating on haressing RFID technology as part of our core business growth.

Starting with basics, RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification System. It involves ID system design using electrical and electromagnetic signals as a medium for non-contact data reading and writing.

Courtesy of Omron

RFID technology is meant as a technology replacement for the barcode system that has been in place for many years. In contrast with bar codes, the RFID System communicates with electrical and electromagnetic signals, hence do not need for precise positioning of the target object during barcode scanning.

RFID, supposedly also meant to eliminate the problem of data errors or not being able to read data due to soiling, moisture, oil etc., on the target object. Being contactless, the communications area will cover relatively a much larger area.

Costs are still the inhibitive factor in the adoption of RFID technology. Each tag, embedded with a microchip and antenna, can cost anywhere averaging from US$0.50 cents to few dollars, multiple by hundreds and thousands per items to be tagged, it is definitely not going to be cheap. Although there has been initiatives to bring down the price of each tag to a low US$0.15 cents with high volume deployment, there are only limited success.

In additional, the amount of data hold by each tag is still limited, 96-bits storage capacity. But with the 2-Dimensional Codes, developed in response to demands on code, it hold promise that more information and be printed in smaller spaces.

Last but not least, RFID are also plagued with interoperability issues, to allow products from different makers to integrate and work together seamlessly. If the adoption of EPC (Electronic Product Code) open standards for the next-generation RFID can take off, it should ease RFID implementation.

RFID has already been widely adopted by the U.S. military, but still a far cry away for mass scale commerical applications. Industry watchers says:

• Applied Business Intelligence: RFID market worldwide will be worth US$3.1 billion by 2008
• IDC: Spending on RFID retail supply chain systems alone will grow to US$1.3 billion by 2008

IDA Singapore has invested a total of S$10 million seed fund to develop Singapore into RFID Hub in Asia, with aims to bring together groups of industry partners, infrastructure service and solution providers as well researchers to gain a headstart for wide-scale RFID adoption in the Asia Pacific region, especially in the high-tech manufacturing and logistics industries.

Reference:

• The RFID Daily Update (Free subscription for professionals)
• Omron RFID Global Website (Omron's range of RFID products and systems)