Below are the top RFID stories of the week, as selected by SCDigest Editors:
 

Impinj Announces New Portal Reader, Significantly Shrinking Size of the Technology

RFID hardware and tag maker Impinj this week announced the release of a new EPC RFID reader portal that substantially reduces the size and perhaps cost of these devices while improving read rates.

RFID portals are typically used in transition points in material handling and movement, such as a dock doors in manufacturing and distribution, or the entry point from a retail backroom storage area on to the sales floor. The idea is that tag goods, whether a single carton or a pallet load of cartons on a fork truck, can be read automatically as they pass the portal reader.

Existing portal readers to date have been quite large, weighing upwards of 150 pounds, which making them unsuitable for some applications. In retail, some chains have tried to create their own “portals” by using several readers at the transition point, but that approach has its own set of problems (cabling, etc.).

Impinj says its new portal (the xPortal), by contrast, weighs just 10 pounds, stands approximately two and a half feet tall, and measures 8 inches wide by 2 inches deep (see image). It requires no AC power cabling, instead being powered only by its Ethernet cable connection.

Key to the portal’s size and performance is a new antenna technology that Impinj calls the Dual-Linear Phased Array (DLPA). An important breakthrough is that the DLPA is not sensitive to the orientation of a tag passing through the portal.

The company also claims the new xPortal will save users an average of $1,000 per doorway.

On first blush, this looks like real RFID innovation from Impinj, which continues to impress. 

Outsmarting Security Guards with RFID

Bloodhound Technologies is a New Zealand provider of RFID systems, especially in the health care and asset tracking area.

We liked this story of the challenges the company and its customers faced in using RFID to track the movements of security guards – a growing application area.

In most such systems, as the guards make their rounds through a given facility, they carry an RFID tag embedded in a card or key sort of structure. As guards pass by various points in the building, they tap those cards on strategically placed readers, from which information about the rounds and guard movements is collected.

Ah, but the guards got smart in many facilities.

“The systems aren’t tamper-proof,” said a Bloodhound company executive. “We had cases where people broke the readers off the walls, then just sat in their offices and 'did their rounds' by tapping their keys on the readers at appropriate moments.”

So, Bloodhound changed the system around.  It made the tags stationary and the readers mobile. Instead of a guard tapping his key button against a reader as he makes his rounds, he carries a mobile reader that actively tracks where it is in the network of tags, and relays that information directly to a central control room.

The tags are active, meaning the guard does nothing as he completes the round.

Pretty smart from our vantage. The basic idea may have other applications. 

(RFID and Automatic Identification Article - Continued Below)