Achieving efficiency!
02 October 2009
As engineers try to get their designs cost reduced by integration, and marketers are trying to open-up new markets, production managers, quality control managers and company directors are faced with a dilemma… how do we stay afloat in a declining market?
The answer to this question is ‘efficiency!’
RFID is a valuable efficiency tool, especially in tracking electronic products in production and assembly lines. RFID essentially replaces the barcode with an extremely small tag enabling the PCB to be tracked throughout the production line.
Implementing RFID as a PCB tracking solution result in advantages over the traditional barcode systems, and the manufacturing process efficiencies are mainly achieved through cost reduction, higher production throughput, and process and quality optimisation.
UHF tags are the most cost effective tags on the market and are also available as SMT mount options. They operate in the 860-950MHz band in the electric field of the electromagnetic spectrum. The electric field comes with a substantial set of associated issues. Reading holes and phantom readings are some of the issues that appear when the signals reflected by various materials arrive at the destination in phase to create a stronger signal or out of phase to effectively cancel each other and thus create a reading hole. However, with careful site surveys and planning working in the UHF yield advantages including the ability to read up to hundreds of tags a second, and transfer a large amount of data to and from the tags.
Another potential problem with UHF is that there is no uniform frequency or power level around the world, although this has been rectified by the EPCGlobal (Electronic Product Code). Texas Instruments TI-UHF-Gen2 technology and NXP Semiconductors UCode G2XL and G2XM offer SMD parts that are extremely small and hold at least 96bits of EPC data. Intermec & Motorola offer complete reader solutions with fixed and mobile options, and all conform the EPCGlobal Gen 2 standards.
Although historically, RFID tags were generally more expensive than a barcode, in recent months the price of the tags has dropped to a few pence. Additionally, the RFID infrastructure is much more cost effective that its equivalent barcode system as RFID readers, once set-up, do not need resetting; a ‘set-and-forget’ system. The barcode systems require line of sight in order to operate correctly, and this is why high-resolution cameras must be reset should the barcode location change or if a different product is being produced.
The line of sight requirement also means that the barcode system would require the PCBs to be read one at a time. In contrast, the UHF RFID solution is capable of reading hundreds of tags per second, which leads to higher production throughput.
Amar Abid-Ali MSc is RFID Business Development Manager for Northern Europe and South Africa, EBV Elektronik.
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