HF RFID tags hit new high

Chips for high-frequency (HF) RFID tags have become the fastest growing RFID segment with more than 565 million being shipped in 2005, according to ABI Research.

NE Asia reports that this represents an increase of HF ISO 14444 tag chips of 104% on the previous year. The ABI has attributed the growth to an increase in contactless payment cards and personal identification documents, such as e-passports.

The US has begun issuing e-passports to its citizens and the 27 nations taking part in the US Visa Waiver Programme have either begun issuing e-passports or plan to do so by October. Many countries are also considering RFID-based national identity cards. The report says this demonstrates that government initiatives are driving, and will continue to drive, the strong growth in this sector.

The US passport RFID debate has resulted in individual states taking up the issue, with California`s State Assembly leading the way by passing legislation that sets out the security guidelines that RFID-equipped state documents must meet.

ARS Technica says the Bill gives guidelines for all documents and identity cards issued by a state, county, or municipal government to use radio waves to transmit data or to enable data to be read remotely and forces them to incorporate certain safeguards.

These measures include implementing a mutual authentication process with the card reader to prevent data being grabbed by unauthorised readers, the encryption of all data, and the requirement that the transmission of any personally identifiable information be placed under the owner`s sole control.

Philips Semiconductor, now known as NXP, has joined Infineon Technologies in winning a contract to supply chips for e-passports to the US government, reports ZDNet.

Just over 80% of the chip business was sold to private equity companies to form NXP, which will continue to concentrate on the automotive, mobile, home and microcontroller markets as it did when still part of Phillips.

Several thousand Philips employees will stay at NXP and Philips has also transferred around 25 000 patents to the new company, including those for making chips to go into the 15 million US RFID passports to be issued in the next 12 months.

US agricultural technology company TekVet is using IBM services for its RFID technology that monitors the health of livestock, reports Wireless Workforce.

TekVet claims its livestock tracking, tracing and health monitoring technology is the first of its kind because it allows cattle producers to remotely monitor the core body-temperature and other pertinent animal or herd data, as well as the specific location of individual cattle in real-time via the Internet.

The information is collected and transported through an RFID sensor inserted in the ear of a cow. Information is then relayed to a collection of wireless receiving stations and transported via a private satellite network to TekVet`s data centre, where IBM System x servers process information for millions of cattle at a time.

DramaView Technology in the US is developing a product range based on the belief that wireless and batteryless systems incorporating RFID will be widely accepted by consumers, reports RFID Solutions Online.

The report says the low acquisition and operation costs, low maintenance, tiny form factor and system scalability of these devices as well as the ability to interact with many other devices will drive market demand.

DramaView says the devices can be integrated together into many form factors, including a low-cost laptop computer that requires no batteries, has no internal electronics, and wirelessly offloads all of the processing and memory to a processor and systems connected to an RFID reader that senses user inputs and drives the laptop`s display to report system outputs.