DASH7 sees “tipping point” for RFID tags
DASH7 sees “tipping point” for RFID tags
An alliance of companies and organizations promoting a standard for active radio frequency identification equipment said last week the U.S. Defense Department has placed its first order for 'DASH7' devices, so named because they use the ISO 18000-7 standard.
The order comes under the military's $429.4 million RFID III procurement contract. Patrick Burns, president of the DASH7 Alliance, said, 'We hope to take this beachhead we have with the military and expand into other areas.'
The alliance said the military's purchase includes products from three vendors — Evigia, IDENTEC Solutions and Savi Technology, which are all members of the DASH7 Alliance.
Burns, who is also head of licensing and alliances at Savi, said he expects most of the military's money will be used to buy RFID tags and that the contract could be a 'tipping point' for RFID devices to be used more extensively and in more interoperable ways. He said the orders should lead to standardized products will be less expensive and because many new products are under development.
The DASH7 devices operate at a radio frequency of 433.92 Mhz, which Burns contends is important because it gives them better ability to penetrate water and concrete and 'bend' around shipping containers than RFID tags operating at different frequencies.
DASH7 tags have been used for a number of years to track ISO marine containers and are about the size of a Snickers bar. Unlike the RFID tags commonly used on toll roads, they are active tags with batteries. Burns said they have a life of about five to 10 years and 'good range — Savi advertises 300 feet, but some of the of the people making these things are shooting distances of more than a kilometer.'
The tags can store information, such as a manifest listing the contents within, and it could be updated. Burns said this could be useful for the military to know, in real time, how much ammunition might be in any containers. And if the standard is used universally, then NATO commanders will be able to see what materiel their partners each have.
There are about 30 different companies, universities and national labs that are members of the DASH7 alliance, and Burns said that many different microsensors are being developed for the devices — thermometers, hydrometers, accelerometers, pressure gauges, even radiation detectors.
Burns expects more of the devices to be manufactured for use on pallets and even cartons. By combining microsensors with the tags' ability to store data, a shipper of refrigerated food, medical products or sensitive electronic gear would be able to read a tag and know whether its shipment has gone out of temperature range, gotten too wet or dry, or been dropped.
There are also many non-logistic uses for the tags, he noted. For example, they can be used to track people moving in and out of warehouses, locate parts on a crowded aircraft factory floor, check tire pressure remotely, check a radiation dosimeters, or help a trucker find the red Impala with the spoiler and special Bose sound system in a Detroit parking lot when it contains thousands of cars buried under a foot of snow.
Other members of the DASH7 alliance include Analog Devices, Austria Microsystems, Dow, Hi-G-Tek, KPC, Lockheed Martin, Michelin, Northrop Grumman, RFind, ST Microelectronics, Texas Instruments Corp., the Department of Energy and its Argonne, Oak Ridge, and Pacific Northwest national laboratories as well as the University of Pittsburgh. ' Chris Dupin