23-03-09 12:26
Age: 3 yrs

BY: MITSUGI, JIN; TOKUMASU, OSAMU; HADA, HISAKAZU

Networked RFID system have been recognized as a powerful industrial tool to enhance the visibility in supply chains by applying RF tags to packages and cases. As the adoption of the technology has been expanded, there has been a strong industrial demand to apply RF tags to product itself for the information management for the entire product life cycle, i.e. the item level tagging. The demand is particularly strong in the consumer electronics arena where manufactures are responsible, at least in part, for the supply chain, the product liability and the product safety. The conventional item level tagging, the data stored in an RF tag memory is only accessed by interrogators. In this paper, we propose the concept of recorder tag, which has both an RF interface to the interrogator and a baseband interface to the microcontroller of a product. This way, we can develop an application for consumers utilizing supply chain related information. We can also develop an application for the product safety and efficient repair by recording essential operational incidents during the product usage into a recorder tag. The key objective of the recorder tag is to bridge the end user and the manufacturers. After introducing the background and the concept of recorder tag, this paper examines the requirements to recorder tag particularly in the consumer electronics industry. A prototype recorder tag using COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) components is manufactured and its fundamental performances are evaluated. This paper also identifies the future issues for the deployment of recorder tag.

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