HP reinvents the wheel er uhm...RFID?

And "Shares of Hewlett-Packard fell 24 cents..." ;-)

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Integrating the antenna on-chip is something that is somewhat atypical and potentially advantageous to HP's approach; otherwise it looks like nothing new.

The second story is clearly influenced by some market droid's report, in that they're often comparing apples and oranges -- these newer,

900MHz/2.4GHz RFID ICs with the older, bulkier 13.56MHz models, or these newer tags -- which all have options have lots of memory onboard, it's always just a question of how much you want to pay -- with really old or *cheap* models where you only get a serial number. I also like how they turn what's clearly a downside -- requiring a reader to be within millimeters of the tag -- into an upside by catering to privacy concerns! ("RFID scanners can read chips as far as 10 feet away!" -- Tell you what, give me a grant for, oh, say, only $250k and I'm quite confident I can take a traditional RFID tag and only make it work over the span of a few millimeters. :-) )

---Joel

Actually, if you could come up with one that was *provably* only readable from less than a few centimeters, regardless of the reader technology (ie immune to white vans and black helicopters), then it would address a legitimate privacy concern. Till then I'll keep wearing my AFDB.

Right now the industry and press seem to be confusing two things: the distance from which a tag can be reliably and inexpensively read, versus the distance from which it can be read at least some of the time by someone who is willing to invest substantial amounts of money to do so.