RFID Analyst

Intellident, UK, has won the contract to supply its RFID tracking technology to Marks & Spencer - one of the largest retailers in the UK.

 

This follows last year's announcement to tag 3.5 million produce delivery trays in Marks &Spencer's food supply chain - that project is now over half way through its implementation.

 

This project will enable Marks & Spencer to manage it's stock more effectively throughout its distribution chain and into the stores themselves. RFID will provide a step-change in stock control and will ensure the availability of garments to customers in stores.

 

Marks & Spencer will be using UHF tags in the UK, which has so far been uncommon due to the tighter regulations meaning lower ranges than offered in America with the same system.

 

UHF tags offer faster data transfer speeds and longer read ranges than the high frequency (HF) tags that have been used for the produce delivery trays. The UHF tags makes them suitable for applications in which many fast moving individual items need to be read - even if they are in very close proximity to each other, e.g. in rails of hanging garments or stacked shirts.

 

Each tag will carry a unique electronic product code (EPC) - which is divided into numbers that identify the manufacturer, product, version and serial number - similar to a barcode. However, the tag product code uses an extra set of digits to identify unique items, vital in the tracking of fast moving items through the supply chain.

 

The EPC is the only information stored on the RFID tag's microchip. This keeps the unit cost of the tag down and provides flexibility, since an infinite amount of dynamic data can be associated with the serial number.

 

 

 

Where very large numbers of items such as tens of trillions of things yearly are involved, a numbering scheme is needed if they are to have unique identification. A read only tag is needed to keep costs down. However, there is still an affordability problem. At IDTechEx, we see four primary issues for TAV (Total Asset Visibility) projects:

 

 

Is "Who pays?" the biggest problem of all?

 

As happened with EAS, "Who pays?" is also a big issue. With EAS, it was only resolved where retailers with transcontinental clout (i.e. in the US) forced suppliers to fit the tags. Industry expert Noel Eberhardt even goes as far as to say:

 

 

At IDTechEx we do not believe any of the problems are insoluble, however, but we do counsel that no orders for hundreds of billions of tags and associated systems will be forthcoming any time soon.

 

Market projections

IDTechEx and some other independent analysts see the total RFID market at more like $10 billion in 2010 including infrastructure and services - not the $200 billion of the currently-envisaged ultimate Internet of Things in CPG. $200 billion is the GDP of a medium sized country. They take a while to establish! A $10 billion market for one cent tags on CPG, postal packages etc. with associated infrastructure and services may be achieved by 2014 or later but someone very wealthy needs to start work soon on the sub one cent tags that will be needed for the highest volume orders within this. They are unlikely to have a silicon chip in them, because of the expense.

 

In RFID, the TAV projects are therefore playing catch-up with the much larger non-TAV RFID projects. For example, the largest cumulative TAV order to date was $280 million to Savi Technology but the largest order for an RFID smart card system was to the Transys Consortium for London's buses and trains and stood at $1.6 billion. Note that the Savi order was mainly systems integration. The Transys order was mainly for facilities management. In TAV we may also see facilities management becoming important in the years to come.

The Auto ID Center have established a base at Keio university, headed by Prof. Jun Murai. In his home country, Professor Murai has achieved guru status for his pioneering work with the internet in Japan. On the new center, Kevin Ashton, Executive Director of the Auto-ID center says "Professor Jun Murai is a legend in the world of networking, and I have no doubt that both he and Japan will play a major role in leading and shaping the future of automatic identification and therefore 21st century computing."

Two camps on RFID

 

While Prof. Murai is undoubtedly the man to bring the EPC and the Auto-ID center vision to Japan, the battle there for a single standard is far from over. Quite apart from the problems of frequency restrictions in Japan for some of the most popular de facto global RFID standards (see October 2002 Smart Labels Analyst - available for free here), it appears that opinion on RFID in Japan is split between two camps. Beating the Auto-ID Center to it, the Ubiquitous ID Center was launched in Japan in December 2002. Designed with a membership model much like the Auto-ID Center, Ken Sakamura, a professor at Tokyo University and head of the new center, is pleased to announce co-operation with NEC Corp., Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd.(DNP), Toppan Printing Co., Ltd., and Hitachi Ltd.

 

There is some friendly gentlemanly rivalry between two great figures in the field of computer science, between two competing standards and between two universities. There is no doubt that the scale of this stand-off is largely a media creation, and we was assured that the two professors get on very well on a personal basis, but this has not stopped some unambiguous statements from both sides!

 

 

The Ubiquitous ID Center

The offices of the new center are located in the YRP Ubiquitous Networking Laboratory. The aim is for the center to work to make decisions on standard specifications and to refine its own business model by next spring. From then, it will start issuing ID numbers. However, Sakamura says his center has already completed its basic research and has the most advanced technology at its disposal. Thus, the Ubiquitous ID center is being set up in Japan because, according to Sakamura, "there's no need to wait for any standardization that's being done outside Japan." For more, read this months journal. IDTechEx will be touring Asia next month to bring you the latest RFID updates from there.

Tagsys (France), Matrics (USA) and RFSAW (USA) demonstrated to IDTechEx their complete EPC (Electronic Product Code data structure from the Auto ID Center) RFID solutions. Tagsys, working with Philips have developed 13.56MHz smart labels which have been imbedded in single use Kodak cameras for demonstrating. The films are stacked on a shelf with a thin reader behind the shelf. Despite all the metal on the shelf, such as the arms holding the products, all the labels were read. The system also monitors theft while it happens—should a large number of cameras be removed at the same time the system could alert security as this could be a theft.

 

Matrics demonstrated their UHF tags on a pallet being read as they were pulled through a gateway reader. Over 100 tags were all correctly identified in the few seconds or so it took to pull the crate through. The read range demonstrated by Matrics was in excessive of 12 foot, and is due to a low power chip design and advanced interrogator antenna designs.

 

Clinton Hartman of RFSAW showed IDTechEx a similar demonstration, using Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) tags carrying the EPC code. Over 100 shampoo bottles were tagged and read in a few seconds as a pallet was pulled through an aperture reader. This would not be easy to do with chip tags at UHF because the liquid shampoo reflects the RF signal causing read-reliability problems. SAW technology is lower power and therefore less susceptible to the presence of liquids and metals.

 

All three demonstrations highlight the capability of the technology today: it has significantly matured and is now ready for implementation.

The Dow Chemical Company, a $27 billion science and technology company, is developing a low-cost electronic display based on printed electrochromic inks. COMMOTION(TM), this flexible display technology has been specifically developed for use in novelty and promotional products, including smart packaging applications. COMMOTION has already been used by UK retailer, Marks & Spencer, for an animated greeting card application. Marks & Spencer sold the card for £3 each. Other applications include smart packaging, which when combined with RFID smart labels will provide new retailing propositions and shelf-edge marketing.

ImageID, Israel, have developed and commercialized a non-electronic label incorporating ID and sensors. The Imagecode marks consist of colours in different arrangements which enable the unique ID of a product. They are read by a camera or camera-based reader. In a demo shown to IDTechEx, a low cost web camera read multiple image codes, and using more sophisticated cameras distances of several hundred feet can be achieved. The costs of the Imagecodes are on par with barcodes, and processes can be automated as the each code can be reliably read - but line of sight between the camera and image code is required.

 

The Image codes can be used beyond RFID. Responsive inks are being used as the coloured segments which can change colour on temperature excursions, the presence of certain bacteria and viruses and so on.

Further to the recent contract by the US Military of $90m to Savi Technology, the UK Ministry of Defence has now followed suit and announced this month a contract to deploy Savi's RFID systems, infrastructure and consulting services to track and manage military supplies end-to-end while in-transit from storage depots to front-line operations.

 

Information about shipment status and location - whether by truck, rail, ocean or air -- will be captured in real time by a global network of fixed and portable handheld RFID readers, and transmitted to highly secured software systems operated by both the UK MOD and the U.S. Department of Defence (DOD).

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