Review of RFID in 2007

Overdesign

Given that a basic ISO 14443 tag needs only 3000 transistors, the 70,000 or more designed into UHF and soon HF EPC tags looks more and more like a Pyrrhic victory for the chipmakers and electronics wizards, given the extreme price sensitivity of the envisaged applications. Watch the allegedly lower cost alternative to EPC called the U-code being trialled by seven East Asian governments. After all, the 5-10 trillion barcodes printed every year are read only.