Speaking at the recent RFID World conference in Dallas, Texas Instruments’ Vice President and General Manager of RFID Business Julie England outlined the company’s strategy to drive RFIDs into many new applications across the enterprise value chain. The company believes that the RFID market is poised to surge from millions to tens of billions of tags over the next five years.

In a keynote address to the attendees of RFID World 2005, England said "Wireless RFID data acquisition, value-chain applications and storage networks will create new business models, much like the cell phone has shifted the market from voice-only to a range of messaging, data and transaction services." She added, “At the edge of wireless and wireless sensor networks, RFID is converging with Electronic Product Code (EPC) and sensor technology to unlock new applications that go beyond identification to include everything from authentication to temperature, time expiration, pressure and condition monitoring."

England outlined this vision of RFID at the edge of the network as one of three core elements of the company's RFID strategy in 2005, which includes bringing the value of RFID to enterprise applications in the retail supply chain, contactless commerce and pharmaceutical markets, as well as driving global standards to enable high-volume, high-quality manufacturing of RFID transponders and reader modules.

"Value, volume, vision is our business mantra as we accelerate our pace of wireless innovation and build on our heritage of making new markets for RFID," commented England.

The company is nearing a production milestone of 500 million RFID tags and is gearing up to produce billions of chips, straps, inlays and reader modules for retail supply chain, contactless commerce and pharmaceutical applications.

"TI's objective is to empower a host of new RFID applications and innovations that drive core business process transformation," noted England. "We're capitalizing on our RF, wireless and packaging capabilities, manufacturing capacity and global resources to make this a reality and are ready to lead the industry toward new and innovative uses for the technology that improve business and consumer value."

Meanwhile, TI also announced at the show that it is delivering EPC Gen 2 tag emulators to five of the leading RFID reader and printer manufacturers. This effort helps to ensure EPC Gen 2 interoperability between TI transponders, and readers and printers being manufactured based on the recently ratified, next-generation UHF standard. TI is on a rapid development path for its EPC Gen 2 chips, inlays and straps with sample deliveries to customers starting in the second quarter and volume production in the third quarter.

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