The life and times of an RFID chip
By Sandra Gittlen
McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas is launching a $125 million program to embed RFID chips in baggage tags as a way to meet post-Sept. 11 security screening mandates and to improve the accuracy of baggage handling at the airport.
McCarran, which handles more than 68,000 pieces of luggage daily, is committed to buying 100 million RFID tags over the next five years, according to Samuel Ingalls, assistant director of Aviation, Information Systems at McCarran.
This is the story of one of those chips. We’ll call it Chippy.
Designing Chippy
The design of an RFID chip depends on its intended use, says John Shoemaker, vice president of business development for transportation and aviation solutions at Symbol Technologies.
“There are different chips for different applications,” he says. “In the process of making the chip, you need to be clear on the architectural design.”
McCarran chose an architecture developed by Matrics, which was acquired by Symbol last year. Chippy will be a Class 0 UHF tag that is read-only and operates in the 900-MHz range. Ingalls says he chose this design because read-only RFID tags offer high levels of security , don’t require batteries or line of sight and can be read from up to 25 feet away. Also, the passive tags are less expensive – as little as 20 cents per tag – than their battery-powered counterparts, which can run $20 to $100 each.
Shoemaker says the gestation period for an RFID chip can be up to six months or more. “You have to do a pilot and run prototypes,” Shoemaker says. Matrics spent more than a year and millions of dollars to develop the passive UHF RFID chip and bring it to production, he says.
Before committing to the chip design and overall project in October of 2004, McCarran put Symbol/Matrics through a several-months-long RFP process. “We had the screening requirement post 9/11 and we became sure pretty early on that that we wanted to move to RFID rather than stay with bar codes,” Ingalls says.
For the entire story please see: http://www.networkworld.com/research/2005/080105-rfid.html
Copyright © 2005 IDG Communications, Inc.