1. History of RFID Technology Development
The development of RFID technology can be traced back to World War II, when it was used for friend-or-foe identification in aerial combat operations. Historically, RFID technology development can be roughly divided into several stages every 10 years (see Table 1). Therefore, RFID is not a brand new technology. In terms of classification, after years of development, RFID technology below 13.56MHz has become relatively mature, and currently the industry is most focused on medium and high frequency RFID technology, especially the long-range RFID technology in the 860MHz~960MHz (UHF band) developing fastest; while the 2.45GHz and 5.8GHz frequency bands have crowded products, are susceptible to interference, and the technology is relatively complex, so related research and applications are still in the exploratory stage.
2. Global RFID Industry Development Analysis
From a global perspective, the U.S. government is an active promoter of RFID applications, and under its promotion, the United States leads the world in establishing RFID standards, developing related software and hardware technologies, and application fields. European RFID standards follow the U.S.-led EPCglobal standard. In terms of closed system applications, Europe and the United States are basically at the same stage. Although Japan has proposed the UID standard, it has mainly received support from domestic manufacturers, and there is still a long way to go if it wants to become an international standard. The importance of RFID in South Korea has been strengthened, and the government has given high priority to it, but so far South Korea's RFID standards are still unclear. Currently, the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, South Africa and other countries all have relatively mature and advanced RFID products.
From the perspective of the global industrial landscape, currently the RFID industry is mainly concentrated in the European and American markets where RFID technology application is relatively mature. Semiconductor manufacturers such as Philips, Siemens, ST, and TI basically dominate the RFID chip market; international giants such as IBM, HP, Microsoft, SAP, Sybase, and Sun have seized favorable positions in RFID middleware and system integration research; companies such as Alien, Intermec, Symbol, Transcore, Matrics, and Impinj provide RFID tags, antennas, readers and other products and equipment.