RFID and NFC, the Road to The Internet of Things and E-Commerce

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is an application of tag identification using radio frequency technology. It was first developed during the Second World War (1935-1950), and was first used by the British Air Force in the field of aviation safety.

At that time, they developed an IFF (Identification Friend of Foe) system, which installed Active tags on each aircraft. When the ground radar transmitted and detected the signal to the aircraft, the tags on the aircraft also a timely response will be issued to distinguish whether the aircraft is an enemy or a friend, so as to prevent the friendly military aircraft from being accidentally hit.

By the 1960s, many papers related to radar and RF were published, and many companies began to commercialize and popularize RFID technology. RFID was first used in the anti-theft mechanism of goods, and this technology is still widely used today: merchants install a set of passive tags in the product packaging, which only have 1 bit of metadata (representing on or off), when the product is paid, the bit will be turned off at checkout. If no payment is made, when the person tries to take the product out of the store, the reader at the door of the store will detect it and issue a loud alarm bell.

Until 1973, Mario Cardullo, the first to apply for a US patent, whose active RFID tags have readable and writable memory and can be used repeatedly, became the pioneer of today's RFID. In the same year, Charles Walton also obtained a patent for passive RFID in the United States, which is applied to door lock products: a transponder is installed on a door card, and when the reader on the door lock detects the correct door card, the lock will be unlocked. Today, the technology is widely used in hotel and residential door locks.

Thanks to the advancement of science and technology, RFID has developed so far, which has been thin, small, and can provide one-to-many reading, reusable, and high storage capacity. Battery-free design, long service life and high safety. Contact-free, can be sensed and read within a certain distance. It can resist various harsh environments, has high ductility, and can be made into various packaging types. Therefore, RFID tags were first widely used in the automation field of warehousing and logistics. In 2005, with the mass adoption of department store retailers, the rapid popularization of the RFID market accelerated.

Nowadays, RFID has a wide range of applications. In addition to retail channels, it now includes logistics and warehousing, national defense and security, public areas, medical care, tourism and leisure, financial services, telecommunications services, transportation, construction industry, exhibition venues, company access control, schools. Security, etc., there are application cases of RFID introduction. Common ones include access control system, goods management, asset recovery, material management, waste disposal, medical application, highway toll system, commodity anti-theft and anti-counterfeiting, automatic control, various tickets, animal identification, dementia prevention and so on.

RFID products are mainly divided into: Tag and Reader (or interrogator). Tag can be divided into Passive, Semi-Active and Active according to the design. What these tags have in common is that there is a tiny chip inside, with a little memory (mainly storing identification information), a radio wave transceiver and an antenna.

Using the point-to-point communication method, when the Tag is close to the Reader, it will receive the inquiry command and electromagnetic waves sent by the Reader, so that the internal chip of the Tag conducts and operates, so that it has enough weak power to connect the Tag. All kinds of information (such as material number, production date, commodity barcode, door number, car number, etc.) are transmitted back, so that the Reader can receive it, and then the data can be transmitted to the computer in the background for subsequent identification and processing.

Passive Tags need to receive enough Reader electromagnetic waves to have enough power to drive their internal operations, so the response and access speed is slower and the distance needs to be closer. The Semi-Active Tag is added with a small battery, which can still transmit information even under the weak Reader signal, so it has the characteristics of good response, fast speed and longer distance.

The Active Tag is equipped with a power supply or a large-capacity battery, which can use its own power to form an effective active area around it, and actively detect whether there is a reader around it, so as to send the ID message.

As for the frequency bands and types used by RFID, there are a total of 6 types: LF (low frequency, used in animal identification and factory data collection), HF (high frequency, usually designed as a card type, such as MIFARE, ISO/IEC 14443 standard, used in commodities are also the frequency band of NFC applications), UHF (Ultra High Frequency, with Active Tags, used in the defense field), ISM frequency band Europe and North America UHF frequency (used in EAN European product code, and various specifications), ISM The microwave in the frequency band (ie, the standard of 802.11 WLAN and Bluetooth), and the microwave in the ultra-wideband (UWB, with Semi-Active or Active Tags) segment. The speed ranges from low, medium, to high speed, and the distance ranges from 10 cm to a maximum of 200 meters.

NFC (Near-Field Communication) technology is an interconnection technology based on RFID, which evolved from RFID technology and is jointly developed by NXP (NXP), Nokia and Sony. This technology has passed ISO/IEC IS 18092, EMCA-340, ETSI TS 102 190 and other international standards have become another derivative technology of RFID, specializing in the mobile device market.

NFC uses the HF (high frequency, 13.56MHz) frequency band, allowing the two devices to communicate with each other within a distance of 20 cm at three transmission speed modes of 106Kbps, 212Kbps, and 424Kbps. NFC is similar to Bluetooth's device authentication technology, except that Bluetooth requires device "pairing" to communicate with each other, while NFC does not, as long as the device is in proximity. Therefore, NFC can also be used as a complement to Bluetooth technology to accelerate mutual authentication between devices.

NFC targets the mobile device market, currently dominated by smartphones. Through the built-in NFC chip, many RFID related applications can be achieved. NFC has 3 modes: card simulation mode, reader mode (can actively read information provided by other devices), point-to-point mode (can be used as data transmission between devices), can be applied to employee identification card, commuting card, access control management, electronic ticket, membership card collection point, computer security login, public transportation ticket, electronic payment and other fields.

Although NFC debuted in 2004, its development was limited due to the fact that electronic payment and related laws were not yet established at that time. However, with the promotion of many NFC manufacturers and the support of ICT manufacturers and software giants, the recent development of NFC has begun to dawn.

Google supports the NFC function in the Android version, and Microsoft has also added the NFC support function in its Windows Phone and Windows. After passing the NFC authentication, the Bluetooth function can be turned on, so as to exchange URLs, Google/Bing map information, contacts (vCard) and pictures. The S Beam launched by Samsung is built into its own mobile phone. After NFC authentication, it turns on the Wi-Fi Direct function for high-speed transmission, so as to transmit large-capacity music, video and other files. NFC can assist mobile phones and make data sharing easier without the need for complicated settings.

Android NFC mobile phones can be divided into three types: built-in mobile phones, built-in SWP SIM cards, and built-in SD cards according to their SE (Secure Element; Secure Element) configuration. In order to manage the NFC card issue uniformly, the GSMA Alliance has defined the TSM (Trusted Service Management) platform to meet the needs of mobile payment providers in terms of operational integration.

However, in Apple's part, its iPhone mobile phones also have built-in NFC chips, which are first used in Apple Pay mobile payment, and the service will also be extended to Apple Watch smart watches. Therefore, the popularity of NFC will change consumption habits.