RFID Tags, Android And IoT

Internet of Things (IoT) will surely be here in 2014. As IoT grows, security with NFC solution and RFID tags will become more widespread in use. With management, daily interaction with social media and email, RFID tag adoption is anticipated to be the technology choice for monitoring mobile.

RFID Blog / Google

ABI Research recently reported that RFIDs will have an expected installed base of 420 million NFC-enabled phones and tablets in the hands of consumers by the first half of 2014. ABI announced RFID will be “in use,” by 2014.  About half a billion installs are expected in the first half of 2014. There is an estimate of 80% of NFC-enabled devices to be smartphones and tablets.

“Google pushed to include it within Android and on the back of this, several of the OEMs with broad product portfolios saw additional benefit in introducing NFC in a wider range of products,” Devlin told NFC Times. “If the MNOs (mobile network operators) had wanted to push, and more importantly pay for it, then NFC handsets, and (NFC) SIMs, could have been delivered sooner.”

NFC tapping introduces a new experience for the consumer. Enterprises such as Google are leveraging NFC. Samsung Electronics even has significant plans for NFC, including enabling payments on its NFC-enabled Android devices. The evolution of NFC is attractive because of its simplicity of the tapping and the high volume deployment of the NFC devices will give the consumer the possibility to interact with both the real world and the virtual world.

RFID

There are two types of battery-powered radio frequency identification (RFID) tags: battery-assisted passive (BAP) tags and active tags, which are used to collect and communicate asset-level information. BAP tags, which were standardized in 2010 in ISO/IEC 18000-6C:2010 Class 3, use a battery for operating the internal circuitry that facilitates the collection, processing and storage of ancillary information. The additional energy may also be used to boost the communication process in difficult usage scenarios, such as personnel tags. Active (Generation 2 Class 4) tags use batteries to power all functions of the tag—the receiving and transmitting of a signal, as well as the power for the processing and memory chips. Both solutions differ from passive-only tags, where there is no battery for communication, additional processing or storage. Although active and BAP tags can technically be implemented at all frequencies in which RFID is used, they are most common at 433 MHz, 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz. via Gartner.