RFID races to meet deployment deadline

The team leader of the radio frequency identification Implementation Vendor Advisory Group painted a grim picture of RFID standards development and deployment during a seminar he gave at a meeting of the Silicon Valley Chinese Wireless Association last week in Mountain View, Calif.

The RFID VAG is a group of wireless experts – including manufacturers, consultants, and large user organizations – working consortium-style to iron out technical RFID issues to accelerate RFID adoption. SVC Wireless is an association in the San Francisco Bay Area that conducts wireless educational events for its members, who work in the wireless industry.

It will be difficult, at best, said last week’s speaker Craig K. Harmon, for the industry to deliver on Wal-Mart and Department of Defense mandates that all their suppliers mark their products with RFID tags by January 2005.

Harmon is president of Q.E.D. Systems, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa company that specializes in standards development assistance for data collection technologies. Among the benefits of RFID are to improve and secure the supply chain, he said.

If you’re not familiar with RFID, it is a wireless technology garnering attention for location tracking of mobile devices and supplies – such as beds and biomedical equipment in hospitals – and even living beings such as cattle and pets. Tiny RFID electronic “tags” embedded in virtually anything communicate wirelessly to an RFID reader, which collects the information.

In supply-chain applications, RFID tags will carry electronic product codes (EPC) and are considered more efficient, faster successors to bar code scanners, which use infrared technology (not radio waves) and require line of sight.

But to meet the Wal-Mart and the Defense Department mandates, said Harmon, there are still issues to be solved for using RFID to record and track incoming and outgoing inventory. Here are just a couple:

* Two parallel RFID standards efforts – by the EPCglobal Hardware Action Group and the International Standards Organization – must merge.

* Approval of the Class 1, Version 2 RFID specification, also commonly known as “Gen 2,” has been postponed until at least September 2004. This version will be heavily used in supply-chain applications and combines previous Class 0 and Class 1, Version 1 RFID specs. It also changes the air interface so the tiny devices can be used in spectrum around the world. Harmon maintained that most vendors will wait for approval to begin developing silicon, and it will take at least nine months for those products to come to market (missing the Jan. 5, 2005 deadline).

* Gen 2 specifies a 96-bit EPC. But the Defense Department, with 46,000 vendors and 16 million line items, will likely need at least a 256-bit tag to handle the number of unique codes it will require, Harmon said.

“The market doesn’t let you fail twice,” Harmon said. “We’re planning to fail the first time. The question is: how do we succeed the second time?”