NY offers RFID licences

New York is offering driver's licences embedded with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips, or enhanced driver's licences (EDLs), says Cnet.

New York has become the second US state to offer identification that can be shown at the border in lieu of a US passport (which is also RFID-embedded).

The RFID chip in the EDL will be able to be scanned by authorities to identify citizens entering the state from Canada, Mexico, or the Caribbean, while international travellers will still need to produce a passport to enter the country.

Students at the University of Arkansas, US, have created a virtual online facility to provide a way for healthcare organisations to test RFID implementations prior to physical deployment, reports RFID Journal.

The researchers, under the direction of Craig Thompson, a professor of computer science and computer engineering at the university, hope the technology will provide a modelling and simulation environment that lets organisations test RFID implementations.

Thompson and the students have digitally created a hospital in Second Life, a three-dimensional virtual world developed and owned by Linden Lab, in which millions of people can visit online.

Daily RFID, China RFID producer, has developed HF Metal Tag-08, a 13mm in diameter tag used for on-metal tagging, and is the smallest tag on the market, according to PR Inside.

The metal tag has read range of up to 1.5cm to 3cm on metal and can be affixed to any metal surface, either mechanically or by using industrial adhesives.

Daily RFID has developed metal tags and labels with materials, antennas and other components to meet applications with the smallest possible product footprint.