Funtrench Journal

By Kingsley Ndiewo.

Funtrench is a fun company to work in. Because of business, the returns and the sheer weight of life lessons that I get from here. All the way from making software for USAID in Embu, to the great house hunt and finally to settling down into the life of a self-employed team, we have experienced so much from God, people around us and business that we could seriously write a book.

It’s rarely that people get insights into what it’s like to work in a company – from the company blog. But at Funtrench we’re proud of what we do and the way we do it – it’s not a job, it’s an experience. An experience in business and technology.

This week my focus is on RFID technology. The technology of proximity cards fascinates because of the convenience it brings. Imagine walking through airport security without producing any documents simply because an RFID reader has read the card in your wallet, which is tucked away in your pocket. Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is the use of an object (typically referred to as an RFID tag) applied to or incorporated into a product, animal, or person for the purpose of identification and tracking using radio waves. Some tags can be read from several meters away and beyond the line of sight of the reader.

Radio-frequency identification comprises interrogators (also known as readers), and tags (also known as labels).

Most RFID tags contain at least two parts. One is an integrated circuit for storing and processing information, modulating and demodulating a radio-frequency (RF) signal, and other specialized functions. The second is an antenna for receiving and transmitting the signal.

There are generally three types of RFID tags: active RFID tags, which contain a battery and can transmit signals autonomously; passive RFID tags, which have no battery and require an external source to provoke signal transmission; and battery assisted passive (BAP) RFID tags, which require an external source to wake up but have significant higher forward link capability providing greater range.

RFIDs are easy to conceal or incorporate in other items. For example, in 2009 researchers at Bristol University successfully glued RFID microtransponders to live ants in order to study their behavior. This trend towards increasingly miniaturized RFIDs is likely to continue as technology advances. However, the ability to read at distance is limited by the inverse-square law.

Hitachi holds the record for the smallest RFID chip, at 0.05mm x 0.05mm. The Mu chip tags are 64 times smaller than the new RFID tags. Manufacture is enabled by using the Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) process. These “dust” sized chips can store 38-digit numbers using 128-bit Read Only Memory (ROM). A major challenge is the attachment of the antennas, thus limiting read range to only millimeters.

Tags: Innovation, RFID, Technology

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 at 09:16 and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.