UHF RFID technology continues to travel down the road toward becoming ubiquitous. As the technology becomes more mature, it is being deployed in more industries each day, with applications growing in sectacors like medical and healthcare, pharmaceutical, retail, hospitality, automotive and general manufacturing.

What’s driving adoption? Users are embracing the fact that the read range of passive UHF RFID has quadrupled in the past few years, meaning that UHF devices can now “see” objects up to tens of meters away. Read rates have increased from 200 tags per second to 1,200, and read accuracy is near 100 percent.

As the use of UHF RFID (860 to 960 MHz frequency range) becomes more commonplace, the focus on the technology is clearly shifting from that of an add-on technology to something that is being increasingly included in original product specs and embedded into products at the point of manufacture.

In digesting this trend, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are placing greater emphasis on determining the best path to take when it comes to embedding RFID into their products. Some are still taking the complex road of buying the components needed to build their own reader modules. Others are purchasing an RFID reader chip and reference design, a somewhat simpler, but still very challenging approach.

A more common and efficient option is to purchase a fully functional reader module that can be easily integrated into a wide range of products.

This white paper offers some key examples of how RFID readers are being embedded into equipment, examines the pros and cons of each option, and looks at how embedded UHF RFID is creating new applications that are expected to drive rapid growth.