The major areas that drive the commercial deployment of RFID technology are logistics,
supply chain management, library item tracking, medical implants, road tolling (e.g., E-Z
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Pass), building access control, aviation security, and homeland security applications. Each
of these RFID systems has customized requirements that currently are de?¬?ned ad hoc. In
addition, multiple, often competing, standards exist (ISO=IEC JTC1, ANSI, EPC, etc.) for
RFID hardware, software, and data management. Thus, most of the RFID systems are
deployed for closed loop applications using either proprietary protocols or nonintersecting
standards with nonreusable tags and readers. As a result, in most applications, RFID tag
and reader hardware and software must be speci?¬?cally designed for each particular
application, and must be physically modi?¬?ed or redesigned every time the speci?¬?cation
for the current application is adjusted, as new applications are introduced, and the
standards are modi?¬?ed or new standards are developed. This keeps the overall design
time long and the system costs high.
Figure 3.1 presents a comparison of different RFID tag design methodologies. The
current state of the art tag development shown in Figure 3.1a requires lengthy design,
fabrication, and testing cycles, which can take months with intellectual property (IP) reuse
to years if developing new IP.
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