RFID 2.0 keeps radio frequency alive and well in the controls industry

One technology that has been around for years, radio frequency identification (or RFID), has withstood the test of time by reinventing itself from time to time. RFID works on the concept of information stored on data carriers attached to objects that are then exposed to an antenna that extracts the information. It is basically a wireless identification system. To create an RFID system, one needs RFID tags, a read/write device and a host system. The RFID system writes data, provided by the host system to the tag using the write function of the read/write device. Data on the RFID can be read back to the host system and, importantly, data on an RFID is re-writable, meaning it can be overwritten by new data.