Thursday, February 26, 2004

Security and Authentication are keys to RFID adoption RFID tags offer advantages over bar codes.  Tags do not require line of sight and they can be read in great numbers simultaneously.  Also, RFID tags with ePC encoding can report the individual serial number of a product.  Bar codes only report the model number. RFID tags deliver more specific information and they can be read faster than bar codes.  Also, companies deploying RFID are planning to read the tags more frequently than they read bar codes today.  As a result, manufacturers, distributors, transporters and retailers will have access to much more information about products as they traverse supply chains.  This improves visibility, allowing all supply chain collaborators to move inventory faster, spend less on inventory and experience fewer errors.  In theory it should also eventually provide complete visibility on any product's complete history, tracking every place it traveled and every company that owned it. This visibility can save money.  It can also eliminate counterfeiting because only legitimate products will have tags.  With knowledge of product history, retailers can also identify so-called 'gray market' merchandise.  This includes merchandise that travels through inappropriate locations or owners, bypassing taxes, regulatory laws and/or obviating manufacturers policies and intentions. For these solutions to emerge, RFID tags must be effective for identifying products without the possibility of fraud.  RFID tags must be secure and difficult to counterfeit. Today's ePC tags are somewhat secure and reasonably difficult to counterfeit.  As a result, these tags offer an adequate solution today for making supply chains more secure, efficient and free of errors.  This is one of the strong motivators that is leading huge players such as Wal-Mart, Target and The Department of Defense to join in planning RFID adoption. As RFID adoption grows, security and authenticity will grow in importance.  Today, technology developers are focused on lowering the price of RFID to drive wider deployment.  To guarantee RFID's long-term viability, these same vendors will need to continuously upgrade security and authentication in their tags, readers and upstream software systems.  This is required for delivering the true value of RFID over the long haul. 9:05:35 PM    comment []

Alien Academy I just spent two days at Alien Technology’s training program, Alien Academy.  For anyone with the time and money to invest, it’s a very worthwhile program for gaining lots of practical information about RFID and Alien’s products. My experience with RFID is primarily focused on software interfaces with readers, communicating information to server-based infrastructure upstream.  For me, the hands-on experience working with tags and readers in varied environments with unusual tagged objects was eye-opening.  I feel like I have a better understanding of the practical issues that must be addressed when companies deploy RFID-based systems. We also reviewed the reader interfaces and software development tools for the newest Alien readers.  This is closer to my area of focus with RFID during the past three years.  The Alien software and interfaces are well-designed and practical.  Definitely much more intuitive than the Philips Semiconductors tools that I have been using recently. Alien is starting to move into the area of management tools for multiple readers within distributed networks.  It’s clearly early days for them in this area, but they understand the importance of such tools.  It should be interesting to see their future products as they emerge. 7:22:06 PM    comment []