RFID Journal LIVE! 2010, the largest RFID exhibition, is the showcase for lots of new products.
There are generally three types of RFID tags: active RFID tags, which contain a battery and can transmit signals autonomously, passive RFID tags, which have no battery and require an external source to provoke signal transmission, and battery assisted passive (BAP) RFID tags, which require an external source to wake up but have significant higher forward link capability providing greater range.
Some of the announcements this week include:
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Santa_Gertrudis.jpg/300px-Santa_Gertrudis.jpg")
The Fujitsu UHF RFID tag is being permanently attached to garments. The tags are soft and flexible, able to withstand hundreds of washings and will help customers in the hospitality, textile maintenance and garment/linen rental industries more quickly, accurately and cost-effectively monitor their inventories.
- AeroScout, the leading provider of RFID for the healthcare industry, will feature three healthcare organizations delivering presentations about their AeroScout RTLS implementations. AeroScout products leverage standard Wi-Fi networks to track and manage the location, condition and status of mobile assets and people.
- Lufthansa’s RFID installation at their Cargo Center in Frankfurt, is the largest scale such pilot application of passive RFID to date in the air cargo industry. Lufthansa Cargo is testing this innovative technology to locate single cargo shipments, pallets and containers on a real-time basis enabling better control of loading and shipping processes. Any passive UHF tag based on the global standard EPC Gen2 can be used.
- ThingMagic announced the Mercury6e (M6e), the world’s smallest 1 Watt, four port module. It delivers greater read range for multi-antenna reader configurations.
- Motorola announced new readers and imagers, introducing a brand new category of integrated RFID and bar code scanners for retail point of sale (POS). It’s designed for both hands-free and handheld bar code scanning.
- The U.S. DOD is tracking shipping containers as they travel to and from Haiti. The DOD switched to 433 MHz active RFID tags complying with the ISO 18000-7 standard and military personnel were able to deploy a reader infrastructure using Savi Technology for a kit containing an RFID reader, a mobile antenna and an Iridium 9601 Short Burst Data satellite modem.
- Savi, a Lockheed Martin company, promoted their SmartChain solution for the chemical, energy, utility, mining and defense supplier industries. SmartChain also monitors the integrity of mission-critical equipment such as pipeline and the status of products and personnel in refineries.
- RightTag is announcing the industry’s first hand-held unit with 3 different built-in readers to support magnetic cards, RFID technology, and both 2D and 1D barcodes.
RFID Journal has a roundup of more announcements. Gartner Group estimated that global RFID revenue will reach $3.5 billion by 2012.
Meanwhile, ABI Research estimates that in 2015, more than 12.6 million 4G machine-to-machine devices – including LTE-compatible models – will ship worldwide. By contrast, in 2010 only about 40,000 (M2M) cellular modules will ship, and all will be WiMAX-based.
According to ABI’s Sam Lucero, “4G offers several benefits for M2M. The first, of course, is sheer bandwidth. 4G networks are also more spectrally efficient than 3G. Finally, there is the question of future-proofing: 4G networks are going to be around for quite a long time.”
On the other hand, 4G modules cost more because they contain more RF chains and larger processors. Price is also based on demand, and many M2M applications do only require low data rates. “Low data rate applications won’t migrate to 4G in the next five years,” says Lucero, “though towards the end of the decade they may, as 3G networks start to wind down.”
