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RFID – Introduction
It’s generally said that the roots of radio frequency identification technology can be traced back to
World War II. The Germans, Japanese, Americans and British were all using radar—which had been
developed in 1935 by Scottish physicist Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt—to warn of approaching
planes while they were still miles away. The problem was there was no way to identify which planes
belonged to the enemy and which were a country’s own pilots returning from a mission.
The Germans discovered that if pilots rolled their planes as they returned to base, it would change the
radio signal reflected back. This crude method alerted the radar crew on the ground that these were
German planes and not Allied aircraft (this is, essentially, the first passive RFID system). [4]
Under Watson-Watt, who headed a secret project, the British developed the first active Identify Friend
or Foe (IFF) system. They put a transmitter on each British plane. When it received signals from radar
stations on the ground, it began broadcasting a signal back that identified the aircraft as friendly. RFID
works on this same basic concept. A signal is sent to a transponder, which wakes up and either reflects
back a signal (passive system) or broadcasts a signal (active system). [4]
In the 1970’s the Los Alamos National Laboratory developed passive tags using ultra high frequencies for
the agricultural department for use in tracking sick cows and their medication dosages. [4]
Eventually, commercial procedure companies started using the 125 KHz radio wave band coupled with
RFID systems to identify goods sold instead of barcodes and later moved up the bandwidth to
13.56 MHz for supply chain usages.
The biggest turning point was in 2004-05 when Wal-Mart decided to make it compulsory for suppliers to
have an RFID tag on each consignment for stock records. Increased volumes resulted in further research
and a drop in prices thereby increasing volumes further.
An RFID couple is broken up into two parts, the reader (also known as the interrogator) and the tag (also
called a transponder). The reader sends out a signal which the tag detects. Then the tag either reflects
back a modulated signal or sends its own signal which the reader detects. This is used to identify the tag
as well as the data stored. This is shown as a top level diagram on the next page (Figure 3)
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