In the first article, we’ve mentioned that the massive application of RFID technology was in the 1990s. In the early days, RFID technology can only be applied to the military field. The RFID label was not widely used at that time. RFID technology began to extend from military to commercial fields with the size of integrated circuit kept reducing and chips went into the process of massive productions.
In this period, people widely used bar code to identify things. Nowadays the bar codes are still widely utilized. Using the traditional checkout method by scanning bar codes in the supermarket, the cashier has to work with the bar code scanner platform to scan the bar codes on the products or enter manually the products’ information to get the bill of the goods, which causes a long queue in front of the cashier and wastes customer’s time. However, by attaching a RFID chip label onto each item in the supermarket, when the customers put the goods they want to buy nearby the RFID reader device, the quantity and price of the product can be automatically read. This will save a lot of checkout time for the customers.
The perception understanding of many people came from an advertisement of IBM. The ad was about a young man doing shopping in a supermarket with his pocket full of the items he wanted to buy. When he walked by the cashier, he got the bill directly instead of waiting to pay. This advertisement shows perfectly the perfect application of RFID technology. The essence of RFID technology is the process of wireless data exchange. This process needs two devices to realize, the equipment for reading and writing RFID data and its matching chips with antennas to write and read data. Data can be exchanged automatically. The process of reading and writing RFID data can work well without any manual operation. Just as the shopping experience of the young man in the ad, the customers are able to scan their items automatically instead of waiting in the long queue to checkout. Compared to the other data collection form such as bar code, we do not need to aim the RFID labels to the scanner. The RFID data can be read accurately in the electromagnetic field of the reader.
As a result, RFID technology is ideal to work with a variety of automation equipment in order to reduce high labor costs, avoid the decrease of working efficiency and eliminate the possible errors caused by manual intervention in data collection. When it comes to the reading speed, the RFID system is able to manage a thousand times’ reading actions per second. The working efficiency of many markets and stores will improve greatly by dealing with thousands of labels at the same time. This is the secret of why the young man in the ad could check out so quickly. We can understand from the video that it is a popular trend to utilize RFID labels in the future.
There is much convenience brought by RFID technology but these are only part of the functions of RFID label. It has many more great functions, for example, the data in the label can be modified many times to carry and spread some important information, which can be reused in a company with security guarantee.
All in all, with the combination of RFID label and bar code, mobile technology and wireless local and wide area networks, the whole operation process of the company will be connected accurately with the administration system. Every operation step will be administered and inspected by the central computer system very well.
