The potential for item level RFID tagging

The potential for item level RFID tagging is far greater than in any other potential application of RFID, as shown in table 1. (See Next Page) It is dominated by the quest to replace barcodes with something more versatile and reliable that has a lower cost of total system ownership over life. It is the Mount Everest of RFID.

Table.1 Examples of global potential for numbers of item level tag

Application Numbers billion yearly Blood 1 Laundry 1 Tyres 1 Air baggage 2 Archiving including libraries 5 Military 5 Drugs 20 Books 50 Postal packages 850 Consumer Packaged Goods CPG 10,000

* Source IDTechEx

Other applications

Other applications may emerge that are substantial such as electronic proof of ownership of even low cost items, tagging assets in homes, offices, factories, museums and so on.

And along the way it will subsume anti theft tags currently running at six billion labels yearly.

In many libraries today the books, videos and DVDs no longer have an antitheft label inside them: the job is done by the RFID label.