What is RFID?

I Believe you  all have visited shopping markets, you all have done shopping from various stores of a Mall, have you ever wondered and noticed a plastic tag like thing on your products whether you buy some clothes or a memory card or anything you tend to see a plastic card attach to it that got detached at the billing counter.Have you ever thought what it is? or what there in it? and why there are attached to the products you are purchasing? If you want to know the answers to all these queries then just read this article and get to know about the technology behind it.

The Technology behind this is RFID, that stands for Radio Frequency Identification.The small plastic cards that we see attached to the various products in the shopping mart contains a small chip that contains the information about the respective products and a small antenna that has been placed over there. The chip can store somewhere about 2000 bytes of data or less.

This technology is very simple and easy to implement.It is a technology that surrounds us every day. It is on our credit cards, passports and as we already know the products that we buy.Even many of the pets have RFID chips in them, that contains all the information related to them so if they get lost or something their information can be retrieved by using RFID reader and then can be sent back to their owner. RFID is treated as an alternative to Bar Codes, we have seen how difficult it is to scan a bar code the scanner needs to be placed upon the barcode completely to scan it and if the bar code has been scratched or something then it becomes really difficult for the scanner to scan it and read the information stored in it, 

On the other hand, RFID devices does not need to be positioned precisely relative to the Scanner,In contrast, RFID devices will work within a few feet (up to 20 feet for high-frequency devices) of the scanner. For example, you could just put all of your groceries or purchases in a bag, and set the bag on the scanner. It would be able to query all of the RFID devices and total your purchase immediately.

RFID technology is not new it has been available for more than 50 years, but since its complete potential has not been achieved till yet it has been underused, and now it is coming into the picture more than before.This technology is good for the purpose of security as well we have seen many times that a shoplifter can easily get caught by this, whenever he/she tries to run away with the products that have not been billed, the reader that has been placed over there at the exit, there exist a transmitter and a receiver, the transmitter keep on transmitting radio waves continuously and when someone tries to escape it reads the information from the chip and finds that this product has not been billed and it blows up the alarm.

Now the question arises.that how does the reader knows that this particular product has not been billed, it's because when we go for the billing at the billing counter the counter person destroy that associated chip by themselves and after that when we leave the store the alarm does not get blown up.

• There are endless possibilities where RFID technology can be implemented, for example a RFID chip can be placed in the human body that contains all the personal information about that person and also the health related information of that person, so whenever the person visits a doctor, the doctor can simply read the information from the associated chip rather than going through all the prescription again and again.


• In UAE there is a chip placed on the top of cars and trucks and a reader is placed on the toll gate that keeps on emitting the radio waves all the time and whenever a vehicle passes by it simply reads the information and the toll tax gets deducted from the car owner's account.


• One of the most common examples is the use of RFID in identity cards, nowadays office people tend to just tap their id card at the entry gate where exists the RFID reader that reads the information from their ID cards and keep track of their attendance.


• RFID chips are also used in credit cards with contactless payments. When you tap a credit card to pay for something, the machine reads a RFID chip embedded in the card. They’re also used for transit systems, tolls, and security access cards. They can be read by a machine with a quick tap.

I hope now you guys got the idea of RFID technology and the various application area of it. Thanks for reading this article, Keep coming back to the blog as I keep on writing new articles each n every day.