Science news could make RFID more efficient

The latest science news from Sweden has the potential to substantially improve the efficiency of a technology with applications in everything from lab products to contactless payments and casino chips.

Radio frequency identification, or RFID, is a technology that has rapidly been adopted to allow objects to be easily identified without the need for physical contact, based on a tiny chip typically embedded into their surface.

Now Bjorn Nilsson of Halmstad University has come up with a way of improving RFID so that it requires less power in order to operate.

His studies are inspired by the fact that multiple tags passing a reader at once can become confused as their signals overlay on one another with no way of separating them out.

"The talk needs to be organised," he argues. "You also want the tags to use as little energy as possible.

"This is what my research is about; how readers and multiple tags talk to each other."