White paper compares RFID frequencies for pharmaceutical industry
25 August 2004
News
Philips, Tagsys and Texas Instruments have released a joint white paper, 'Item Level Visibility in the Pharmaceutical Supply Chain: A Comparison of HF and UHF RFID Technologies.' As established providers of radio frequency identification (RFID) technologies, the companies combined their expertise to detail the technical capabilities, deployment characteristics, and applicability of passive high-frequency (HF) and ultra-high frequency (UHF) technology for pharmaceutical item-level pedigree tracking applications.
The pharmaceutical industry is looking to RFID as a primary way of improving the safety and efficiency of the international drug supply chain through counterfeit prevention, decreased shrinkage and diversion, improved inventory management, and faster product recalls. According to the Food and Drug Administration, RFID provides the most promising approach for reliably tracking, tracing and authenticating pharmaceutical products, and it is recommending widespread use of RFID at the item-level by 2007.
Despite industry momentum for RFID, there are still many misconceptions and issues to be resolved, including the choice of frequency. While much of the focus has been on passive tags in the UHF bandwidth, the paper also provides an in-depth perspective on HF technology, discussing the technical and deployment characteristics that make it the most effective path with the lowest risk for item-level identification and pedigree tracking.
The paper is available at www.semiconductors.philips.com/acrobat/other/final_whitepaper.pdf.
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