They’re being used everywhere now. Credit cards, passports, IDs, etc. Soon they will be embedding them into every product we buy… Seems like an investment worth looking into atleast, but I can’t seem to find the company’s behind all of this.
Any idea?
Lots of companies.
Here’s a start: http://www.smartcardalliance.org/member/offering?id=17
The IC industry is a bit more complicated than you might thing.
Here is a page about an RFID reference design. Basically, each company wishing to sell an RFID chip creates a custom one for an application, often by slightly modifying the reference design. It looks like the antenna is a hard part, based on the Google hits I get. The RFID chip is mixed signal, in that it has both digital and analog (the radio transmitter) components.
After the design is taped out one of the fabs in beowulff’s list will manufacture it, but they also make lots of other stuff.
From what I’ve read of this business, cost is the number one concern, possibly followed by power consumption. The technology doesn’t seem to be particularly difficult, but when you want to sell them in the millions, every fraction of a cent counts.
I’m not aware of any companies that do RFID alone. The fabs do plenty of other stuff (and aren’t in great shape these days) and the design companies do lots of other stuff also. I think it is going to be a very competitive marketplace. The real winners might be users of RFID, if they can realize savings in better inventory management. WalMart had a bit effort in forcing suppliers to use RFID, but it hasn’t been very successful so far, at least not according to the last article I read.
I think it really depends on the application. Whether you’re putting them in cats, on oilifield equipment, or encrypted in credit cards, the manufacturer is going to be different.