RFID--What is it? What is the technology's promise? Here is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of RFID Essentials. This multi-part series will take you from nuts and bolts, through challenges, all the way to adoption guidelines.
In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare wrote, "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them." RFID is one of the more recent four-letter abbreviations to have greatness thrust upon it in a flurry of industry mandates, governmental legislation, and hyperbole. RFID stands for Radio Frequency Identification, a term that describes any system of identification wherein an electronic device that uses radio frequency or magnetic field variations to communicate is attached to an item. The two most talked-about components of an RFID system are the tag, which is the identification device attached to the item we want to track, and the reader, which is a device that can recognize the presence of RFID tags and read the information stored on them.
