RFID Chip

A RFID Chip is a tiny bit of silicon, smaller than a grain of rice, that carries information—anything from a retail price, to cooking instructions, to your complete medical records. The RFID Chip is an important advance because it no longer depends on humans" to spot funny money. Unlike today's antitheft tags, every RFID Chip has a unique serial number. This means that stores could track each customer's comings and goings. An RFID Chip is a small silicon chip that carries limited information and emits data, either actively or passively using radio waves to identify individual items thereby not requiring line of sight or human intervention for identification. Readers capture this information and pass it on to applications which can then process and use this information providing an all-pervasive view the tagged product through the supply chain.

When RFID Chip is embedded in electrical devices, such as cellular phones or PDA, it can get a power source from whatever is driving the device. However, if RFID Chip is embedded in common consumer products, such as soda cans or cookie boxes, they most provide its own power source. Many RFID Chips are designed to run on low power to save battery, but putting a power supply and a chip on 80 cent product is still costly. To solve this problem, passive RFID techniques are used. For passive RFID chips, there are not power source. Chips will receive electrical magnetic wave from antenna, and generate its driving voltage from the antenna. This way, chips will not run out of power, and it will only run when there is the trigger signal from outside.

Unlike a printed bar code, an RFID Chip can do much more than store data placed in it by a manufacturer. A "read/write" type of RFID Chip can store data that is added by each person who handles the box, carton, unit, etc. For example, the date an item was received in and the bin location where it was placed; each date the item was moved and the bin location to which it was moved; the date it was picked for delivery and the ID of the customer to whom it was sold (or "rented", as in the case of paper towel dispensers). Read/write RFID Chip allows tracking items at every stage of the supply chain. Users who are allowed to add data must use special "read/write" devices. Authorized and equipped users can even erase all the stored data, and then store brand new data (such as a new item code, date of receipt, etc.); something not possible with bar codes. When reading, read/write devices check for validity just as read-only devices do. RFID read/write devices; encoders, printer-encoders (for bar code labels with an embedded RFID Chip) and related equipment are already on the market.

The RFID Chip poses a threat to privacy because of its potential for abuse by governments, businesses, or others with reception technology capable of reading the information transmitted. Like a talking bar code, an RFID Chip can talk to a scanner several feet away and tell it far more than a printed label, even from inside an unopened carton. The RFID chip needs no power (the power is in the reader) yet can be scanned through packaging, hence a pallet load of goods can be scanned without unloading to check each individual items' bar code. An RFID Chip can hold approximately 128,000 characters of data, as opposed to the 1000 characters of more recent bar codes.

RFID Chip, also known as RFID tags, is being touted as the greatest invention for retailers since the bar code. A tiny computer chip can be embedded in any product for sale, or the package it comes in, to uniquely identify it. In a store such as Wal-Mart, a company seriously interested in the technology, an RFID scanner sends out a radio signal, and each chip responds. The retailer has just taken inventory, saving a great deal of work. As great as this may sound, there is a dark side to this technology.