LONDON — A British start-up, RFTRAQ (Guildford, England) is ramping up production of its Active RFID tags in an attempt to help jump start the use of the devices and expand into new application sectors.
"We are increasing capacity at our new Guildford manufacturing site to 3 million of the active RFID tags a year and betting that this will be a catalyst for the deployment of these devices and systems in a wide range of industries", Douglas Hogg, CEO of RFTRAQ told EE Times Europe .
The privately funded company recently raised £10 million in equity and Hogg said about £500,000 of this ws used a major expansion of manufacturing capacity.
Hogg said this was necessary because active RFID tags from other suppliers "just did not meet our, or our clients' requirements in terms of performance and longevity."
He added RFTRAQ will use the tags in its own systems and sell them to other OEMs.
The read/write and IP addressable Active RFID tags are part of the company's range of end-to-end RFID software and hardware systems for industrial environments The tags have a much longer range of up to 400 m, said to be four times the distance of comparable UHF tags.
Hogg says there is within the industry at large more discussion about the potential application of Active RFID than actual action, but the company is bucking this trend and boasts a customer base of blue-chip clients. mostly in the printing and paper industries.
The bulk of the funds raised went — and are going — into product development, with a major innovation being the deployment of reusable and recyclable Active RFID-enabled aluminium "'cores" which sit at the centre of multi-tonne rolls of paper.
Hogg says RFTRAQ, formerly known as Core Control, has applied for 30 patents on its advances, and 5 of these have already been granted by patent agencies worldwide.
The company's Active RFID tags can remotely or automatically change RF frequencies across all three regional (Asia, US and Europe) UHF bands (902MGz, 915MGz, 868MGz), bypassing concerns about standards and interoperability.
The IP addressability of RFTRAQ's hardware, he stresses, enables remote access to individual tags and readers, enabling them to be managed and reconfigured remotely once they are deployed in the field.
They all comply with, and are certified to, the recently changed European Technical Standards Institute guidelines for RFID tags.
Hogg maintains RFID has been much-debated in recent years while its commercial deployment has been relatively slow. The paper and printing sector, because of its "demanding and relentless" nature is already ahead of the curve in Active RFID adoption, and Hogg is now looking to other sectors, in addition to retail, "to go beyond the barcode legacy and experience the tangible and immediate benefits which Active RFID provides."
The company's approach, over the past three years, has been to design and develop systems that are in effect "an extension of our software and so can be dropped into any TCP/IP network," said Hogg.
