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New ProductsPrecise RTLS for Aerospace and DefenseRFID Global Solution, Inc. and Ubisense announce a partnership and immediate availability of applications for the aerospace and defense markets using Visi-Trac™ and Ubisense technology. "Acquiring accurate, reliable location data on assets, tools, and equipment in complex aerospace assembly facilities and military installations has been our challenge," states Diana Hage, Chief Executive Officer of RFID Global Solution, Inc. "We have been testing technology solutions that can reliably find and track tools, composite parts and personnel in assembly plants and urban terrain environments, to track location with pinpoint accuracy and movements in real time. We were pleased to find Ubisense deployments that work reliably and are highly scalable with extreme accuracy." "We were impressed by Ubisense' extensive customer base including Aston Martin, BMW, Continental, DHL, IBM, Lockheed Martin and the U.S. Army, which align with our target segments," adds Hage. "By integrating our Visi-Trac asset visibility platform with Ubisense technology, we can deploy a solution quickly and cost-effectively in our target markets." RFID Global Solution announced the availability of Visi-Trac, an enterprise platform, which captures a wide range of RFID and sensor technologies including Ultra Wide Band, GPS, barcode, and temperature sensors, in April 2009. "Visi-Trac allows customers to rapidly integrate and deploy scalable, real-time visibility solutions," states Richard Green, Chief Executive Officer, Ubisense. "What caught our attention about the Visi-Trac platform is that it has already been deployed at a number of RFIDGS customers in multiple industries for mission critical applications." "RFID Global Solution has a significant customer set including Boeing, the U.S. Army, other U.S. Department of Defense services, Killdeer Mountain Manufacturing, and other commercial customers with enterprise asset tracking needs," adds Green. "RFID Global Solution is a key addition to our global partner ecosystem." Secura Key Releases New and Improved Access Control Resource CD
Requests for copies of this powerful new tool should be sent to mail@securakey.com. Secura Key products are available through major distributors of security, access control, locking hardware and gate control equipment. News DeskHow Can RFID Take Off at Airports?By Eric Van Osten Two years ago, Dallas Fort Worth Airport (DFW), American Airlines, and a group of partners (including IBM, Oracle, Cisco, the University of Texas, and others) began the formative stages of creating a service to track-and-trace luggage, possibly based around RFID technology, to validate that a rational business model exists. Howard Lock, Senior Member of the Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group Transportation and Hospitality Practice, says the hypothesis was: "to create an RFID-based solution to track-and-trace bags through DFW and all of its network of airports that American Airlines uses in order to drive an appreciable ROI." "What DFW and Cisco did together was really a conceptual academic thought model of what it would be like and what the benefits would be of increasing baggage track-and-trace," says John Parrish, Associate Vice President in Charge of Terminal Technology, DFW Airport. Both Lock and Parrish agree that RFID is the best solution that presents itself. It's non-line-of-sight and not affected by the demanding operational environment or the dirt, light, and other things that can degrade the durability of the tags. The team looked at the number of bags that are mishandled, where it occurs, how much it costs, and what the impact would be (cost and customer service) of reducing that number of mishandled bags. Would the cost reduction in mishandled bags over time be sufficient to pay for the deployment of an RFID baggage track-and-trace solution? They discovered that there are a tremendous amount of benefits both financially and in terms of customer service. Guests can be kept better informed of the whereabouts of their baggage at any given moment; and a more positive guest experience could be provided, while saving on the cost of mishandled bags. Analysis demonstrated that the preponderance of mishandled bags occurs at transfer points at hub airports because the sheer number of bags to sort. The thought is that if track-and-trace could be deployed at those keys hubs in the U.S. and throughout the world, the number of mishandled bags and the cost could be dramatically reduced. "We determined that most of the errors that ultimately lead to mishandling of the bags and lost bags occur at the transfer stage—61% of mishandling of bags occurs during tail-to-tail transfer," says Lock. The team's analysis looked at an adoption of RFID use at DFW and its neighboring airports over five years. It then examined the actual benefits of deploying RFID-based solutions. "We think they can drive baggage mishandlings down by about 51%, saving an airline, in this case American Airlines, about $50 per mishandled bag," says Lock. "IATA estimates that the average overall cost for repatriating a delayed bag is about $100, and $500 is the average compensation for a lost bag. The use of RFID almost eliminates these from the system." A surprising discovery was that the cost of the tag, while it needs to come down, really is not the most sensitive factor—the adoption rate is. "The disruption of implementing an RFID system would pose a problem because of the economic melee in which we live," says Parrish. "Our analysis shows that implementing a system like this would have a dramatic beneficial effect on the airline industry as a whole. Unfortunately, the buy-in cost at this point in time is just prohibitive. The airline industry, like every other industry today, is experiencing the difficulties of the economic condition." Standards will have to play a role in the widespread use of RFID in airports as well. There are different RFID specifications for North America, Europe, and Asia, all operating at different frequencies. Use of RFID will accelerate the opportunity for passengers to not only self-check-in (acquiring boarding pass from a self-check quiosk) but will also be able to self-check their bags: that is, they will be able to access their boarding pass, obtain a bag tag that they will apply to the bag itself, and then drop it off, thereby eliminating a significant wait for bag check-in that exists today. The reason that self-check-in is not employed with barcode labels today is that there is a challenge with the readability of barcodes, since they require line-of-sight. An agent applies those labels, making sure that the barcode is placed very carefully in visible sight—a task that if given to the customers who might be in a hurry, may not be done properly. RFID eliminates that careful line-of-sight requirement. So this could be how RFID adoption will occur in the airline industry. You can eliminate processes and improve passenger experience. For premium customers, they may opt to use a permanent RFID bag so that would eliminate even another process—applying the bag tag. This allows for some opportunities for premium services, to eliminate pain points for the passenger and the airport, and create labor arbitrage. There will be no need for an agent to be involved in check-in, but for premium members who have their own tagged bags, they may need to have an additional tag (barcode or RFID) applied by an employee in the backroom. "You are trading off the time a customer-facing agent might take at counter and trading it off for time spent by an employee in the backroom at a lower cost," explains Lock. "When operated broadly, RFID can produce opportunities to improve the baggage handling process and therefore productivity of the labor force at the airport—the most costly component of the operation at the airport." Other benefits exist that are perhaps more difficult to calculate. Flight delay: waiting for bags to catch up to a passenger, particularly for international flights where you have to have passenger baggage reconciliation for security reasons. If the status of the bag that is not yet on board of the aircraft is known (where it is, how long it might take), operational decisions can be made by the pilot and airline on how long to wait for that bag or to depart without it. Even on a domestic flight, that decision is really important because sometimes aircrafts do take off without the passenger and bag repatriated or reconciled. That requires the passenger then to wait for that bag or have it delivered to their hotel or home. So, it eliminates a significant cost potentially but also contributes to reduction in delayed flight departures. The Las Vegas airport has already implemented RFID. Unlike most airports in the U.S., it has a centralized baggage sortation system. That means that all the bags from all of the terminals at all of the check-in points go to one central location. Without having a strict track-and-trace system in place, they wouldn't be able to sort the bags back out of that central location to the proper gates. Most airports, DFW included, have a decentralized sortation system—that is to say each terminal has its own sortation system, so bags from that terminal stay in that terminal. "As a result, there isn't the strict level of track-and-trace available that Vegas offers because the bags won't get out of my sight, virtually speaking," says Parrish. "We will always have a barcode reader, a photo eye, a camera—something will be on it practically 100% of the time as it goes from the checking position down to the make-up unit. That doesn't help me for the bags lost in transfer. So while on the one hand, the fact that my sortation system is decentralized and I don't need the level of track-and-trace that the centralized system requires, it doesn't help DFW or any other airport when it comes to the transfers." Those transfers essentially go from the cargo hold of one airplane into a trolley and into the cargo hold of the next airplane, which is a manually-intensive process. So, even though there is a decentralized sortation system, track-and-trace is still needed for the transfer bags so that bags can be tracked from their origination point through the transfer point to their end point. RFID has been tested by United Airlines at the Chicago O'Hare airport. Air New Zealand has begun using boarding passes enabled with RFID. As RFID becomes more widely used, it will become an element that all airlines will want to include in their offerings in order to stay relevant to their competition. At that point, the idea of using RFID will fly and everyone will want to be on board. Revolutionary RFID Antenna-on-Chip Improves Reliability in Medical Sampling
The timeliness and reliability of your medical results can mean the difference between life and death. One recent study shows that pathology labs on average find errors in eight percent of the blood or tissue samples they process. Reducing this error rate is a key driver for labs to improve their methodologies. Founded in 2004, Tagent Corporation—a Silicon Valley company providing technology-based solutions that enables medical laboratories to track large numbers of samples more accurately and efficiently—recently developed a revolutionary antenna-on-chip wireless technology that is integrated into a custom semiconductor device. The RFID tag with an antenna embedded right into the chip, is the industry's first. The chip is embedded into a label that is attached to medical samples for tracking from the patient through lab processing all the way to disposal. Tagent developed the technology for the antenna, but needed additional design tools and support to complete the chip. Jarie Bolander, Co-Founder and Vice President of R&D at Tagent who worked with Cadence EDA tools at his previous company and was familiar with Cadence personnel introduced the company to Cadence's Global Services and got Tagent interested in not just tools, but in other Cadence solutions, IP, and support as well. And so, Tagent approached Cadence to help them tapeout their groundbreaking chip. A hosted design environment—an ideal solution Tagent's commitment to fully integrating an entire RFID tag onto a piece of silicon had its challenges. A key decision was whether to do all of the design in-house or outsource part of the work. If they designed everything in-house, they would have needed to hire several senior analog/mixed-signal (AMS) designers—experts who are difficult to find. To support its own internal design team, Tagent needed comprehensive AMS technologies and methodologies plus CAD support. "Our core competency is the ability to collect and transmit power with an antenna-on-chip system. We don't want to hire CAD guys; we don't want to build a huge infrastructure to support staff," says Bolander." Anything that allows us to outsource in a reliable, secure way, is a big win for us. When Cadence discussed their hosted design environment, we thought it was right on." Cadence Hosted Design Solutions combines industry-leading and production-proven technology, methodologies, services and an intra- and inter-company collaboration via a secure IT infrastructure to optimize the customer's time to productivity. Cadence not only provides the infrastructure, but also provides a fully integrated and proven environment that leverages knowledge from across the Cadence engineering, services, and applications teams. The result is a robust and streamlined flow enabling customers to take advantage of all the latest design techniques and advanced product capabilities. Collaboration critical to success Tagent's antenna-on-chip design was a bold move—an industry first with antenna on chip, in addition to being one of the smallest ever built for its frequency range. The completed ID tag measures just 2 mm x 2 mm. Designers usually try to avoid putting an antenna on chip because it can interfere with logic on the chip and can also break some of the processing the fab does. Therefore, Tagent designers had to come up with a set of rules to put the antenna on the chip in a way that was manufacturable. Clearly, collaboration from the very beginning was crucial to the project's success. One of the biggest advantages of Cadence Hosted Design Solutions is the collaboration aspect, which Tagent leveraged by supplementing its own engineering team with Cadence experts at the right point in their design cycle. Cadence designers did a major portion of the design requiring AMS expertise, while Tagent designers handled everything else that touched the antenna. Usually the problem with collaborative design work is the need for the same work environment. When CAD flows don't match, there are wasted efforts and roadblocks. But in a hosted environment, if the customer has unique requirements, or should a problem arise, the collaborative aspect of the infrastructure makes it easy for Cadence experts, regardless of location, to work with the customer's team. "The Cadence goal is not only to sell EDA technology, but also to put together a practical solution that leads to our customer's success. In the case of Tagent, we were able to do that by working collaboratively with their team through a combination of our Analog, Mixed Signal, and RF methodology and design services coupled with Cadence EDA technology in a hosted environment," says Tim Henricks, Vice President of the Cadence Global VCAD AMS/RF Solutions Group. Cadence Hosted Design Solutions can also scale to support customer needs, whether it's supporting a few designers in a single location or multiple large design teams globally. Tagent is pleased with the Cadence Hosted Design Solution and plans on using it for future developments. "We like the level of service, the responsiveness," Bolander summarizes. "Cadence is very customer-focused. Anything to solve the customer problem is what they're going to try and do. We've always felt very confident that any issue we had would be resolved rapidly and to our advantage."
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By Vishal Kapoor, Cadence Design Systems
