RFID im Blick · AutoID/RFID Marktplatz und Presseportal

The European EPC Competence Center (EECC) has been the global market leader for RFID performance assessments for five years in a row. Its revolutionary UHF Tag Performance Survey (UTPS) has consistently set new standards within the global RFID industry and its following has greatly increased with each year. According to CEO Conrad von Bonin: “our success is based on the fact that we have been able to consistently push the boundaries of RFID research through the introduction of new performance measurements and innovative modelling approaches each year that ultimately allow our clients to build increasingly sophisticated systems. Our stringent focus on RFID innovation has already uncovered many new insights and will continue to drive our value to the market.”

 This year EECC introduces a new performance measurement that helps companies to drastically improve RFID tag bulk reads through optimized transponder selection. Researchers at EECC have defined a new metric, the Proximity Stability Indicator (PSI), that has already proven to be a highly useful metric for a wide variety of real-world applications. Using PSI it is now possible, for the first time, to quantify mutual interferences within densely packed transponders populations, a scenario that is very common in many retail and supply chain applications. “Achievement of drastic improvements in the speed and reliability of data reads from large numbers of transponders has long been a primary objective in the retail industry” explains Dr. Gerd Wolfram, Managing Director, METRO SYSTEMS GmbH. “EECC’s new UTPS captivates with its application-oriented measurement scenarios. Its findings provide us with the knowledge to confidently select the optimal transponder-solution for every conceivable application worldwide” praises Wolfram. For example, material effects can be forecast so accurately today that a selection of optimally-suited transponders is possible. For clients EECC’s work and reports substantially reduce R&D expenditure as companies do not have to go through very costly trial and error experimentation to determine transponder choices among other things.

 Applying the new PSI metric, EECC engineers found that the performance range of hangtags in apparel applications for example was so large that only few viable candidates remain. Read ranges can decrease by up to 85 percent when some transponders are densely packed. However, that is only true for certain transponders while others fare extremely well under the same circumstances. Given that 80 percent of all transponders are advertised as suitable for dense packaging, the EECC research findings through the application of PSI constitute a huge leap forward. In addition, EECC found that successful transponders for in-garment applications were not always the best choice for flat or cardboard attachments. The researchers ultimately found that the results varied greatly depending on tag orientation and also with the frequency. Surprisingly sometimes the reading distance in proximity situations for one tag type can be reduced for one frequency and increased for another frequency at the same time. Thus, the read range for a given transponder has to be adjusted based on frequencies. PSI essentially provided not just an explanation for intuitive and counter-intuitive system behaviour, but also a means to select the best-possible tag for any type of scenario ranging from DVD tagging to books and garments.

 The recently released UTPS 2011 includes findings from over a hundred label and mount-on-metal (MOM) transponders of the newest generation. Overall, EECC conducted well over half a million measurements, which is unprecedented to date. Given that this new knowledge rests on top of existing insights accrued over the past five years, UTPS is by far the most in-depth RFID report in the world today. “We also see broader developments, strategic insights if you want, such as material changes in transponder performance across time. A transponders’ dependence on the underlying materials is decreasing as far as read range is concerned. At the same time performance has increased at constant form factors from last year. In essence, tags are becoming increasingly versatile and thus more universally applicable”, says von Bonin. Furthermore, almost all transponders use integrated circuits of the newest generation and the first labels are already produced with an ecological point of view.

 Since last year, EECC has seen a 32 percent increase in the number of transponder inlays tested. This is a natural consequence of industry expansion, but also illustrates the increasing complexity that companies and integrators have to deal with when they select the best components for their RFID solutions. Another interesting development is a drastic 84 percent increase in the number of MOM transponders in the UTPS. EECC has even tested the world’s first label-based MOM transponder recently. In essence, the megatrend for MOM transponders is their growing variety.