Simulate and succeed

PUNE: Simulation of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) applications need to be carried out to check problems in advance before making huge investments on hardware and for product development tests, said Prof. Mag. Elke E. Fritz, senior advisor at the Austrian consulting firm, double-S.

He was outlining the major hurdles so far in RFID deployments at a workshop organised at I2IT (International Institute of Information Technology) here.

While one billion cards heralded commercial RFID in public transport applications in Singapore, Hong Kong, San Francisco, Japan and Beijing, problems such as proximity, limited card operation and one-card-per-access have been of concern.

Prof. Fritz also pointed out areas like limited processing of bulky items and non-disposability of labels in applications like library and document tracking, and failure of trials in the Logistics industry. For the latter, he highlighted choice of inadequate equipment, unknown field gaps, unpredictable influences from adjacent environment, wrong and unsuitable label configuration, and used antennae as some of the reasons.

“As a customer, one should be very discerning about RFID investments and component choice and hype should always be sifted away from real business needs,” he observed.

Another expert, Dipl. Ing. Josef, CTO, BU manager, RFID and RFComm at CISC Semiconductor talked about HUG (Hardware User Groups), SUG (Software User Groups), DRM (Dense Reorder Mode), regulatory challenges like separate shouting readers and whispering tags into different parts of the spectrum besides touching upon various standards in RFID.

“High identification rates, shorter identification times, and reliable identification are optimization criteria for RFID,” he said.

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