Op-ed: how RAIN RFID tags are shaping a smarter manufacturing future

Posted on 15 Jan 2025 by The Manufacturer

In this exclusive op-ed for The Manufacturer, NXP Semiconductor’s James Goodland looks at how RAIN RFID tags are shaping a smarter manufacturing future.

Manufacturing is big business. It contributed $2.9tn to GDP in 2023 in the United States alone, employing more than 13 million people. The industry is evolving rapidly, and RAIN[1] RFID (Radio-Frequency Identification) tagging technology is at the forefront of this transformation, with smarter tagging driving greater efficiency, productivity and cost savings.

At a fundamental level, RAIN RFID tags help to show where items have been. That means manufacturers can track components from suppliers into a factory. Tags can be used to accurately monitor inventories, see where components are stored within a factory, and follow their journey throughout a production line. The technology can also track goods as they move to the next stage of the supply chain.

The introduction of ultra-high frequency (UHF) RFID technology helped to kickstart a revolution in manufacturing. MIT’s Auto-ID Centre was set up in 1999 to develop a system that could identify goods as they moved through the logistics network using an Electronic Product Code (EPC). This UHF technology, now often referred to as RAIN RFID, enables companies to use tags to track products and components throughout the entire global supply chain.

We’re now seeing the next step in RAIN RFID technology’s evolution, with more cost-effective solutions and higher sensitivity technology helping to drive manufacturing 4.0.

The recent evolution of RAIN RFID

There have been some big changes to RAIN RFID and other wireless technologies in recent years. The cost of RAIN RFID technology has fallen thanks to improvements and advancements in design and manufacturing. Performance has increased, making it possible to tag items that were previously difficult to tag. Connectivity is almost ubiquitous, too, while also being fast enough to read up to 1,000 items per second. Modern systems including AI can analyze all this data and make use of it to discover trends and inform, helping businesses to improve their operations. Not only has RAIN RFID become more affordable, accessible and scalable, it’s also become a lot better.

15 years ago, RFID tagging started to gain traction in retail apparel tracking with rollouts of the technology globally. Although retail is the most mature market in terms of RAIN RFID penetration, many other industries such as manufacturing, logistics, and aviation have been implementing RFID to provide visibility throughout supply chains. For manufacturing and industry, the working environment can be quite harsh, including metals, liquids, and other materials. When coupled with small components in these industries, things become more difficult for RFID.

As a result, semiconductor companies have put significant effort into developing every generation of RAIN RFID product to be more sensitive. More sensitive tag integrated circuits (ICs) are more efficient and therefore require less energy to power up. This efficiency enables tags to be identified from greater distances, helps RAIN RFID readers to read more tags simultaneously, and makes it possible to design smaller tags. This in turn facilitates the tagging of smaller items and components. All of this is important for manufacturing industries, as it means use cases and the list of components that can be tagged have grown significantly.

Greater sensitivity is also leading to more automation within RAIN RFID and manufacturing. We’re still largely in a handheld world, where people are using scanners to read RAIN RFID tags manually, but this is beginning to change. There are more applications that use doorway or overhead readers, for example, with such automation making it easier and faster for manufacturers to accurately track which items have come into the factory, warehouse or build room, and which items have left, without the need for manual intervention.

We’ve reached the point where it’s possible to embed specially designed tags into components and tools that are just millimeters in size. There are many great examples across the industrial space, such as using RAIN RFID technology to tag and track equipment, helping to eradicate foreign objects debris (FOD) in manufacturing. Chip sensitivity and novel tag antenna design is also changing the materials that can be tagged by manufacturers, providing the ability to read tags in proximity of or directly placed upon liquid containers, metals and other materials that previously prevented the adoption of the technology.

Production lines can be far more efficient as a result. Manufacturers can use tags to track entire pallets, ensuring that parts are where they should be, when they need to be, helping to avoid unexpected delays and additional costs in the build process. The ability to tag smaller or more complex components is also changing the face of manufacturing itself. Companies can use tags to follow individual parts throughout the build process to ensure and verify that components are assembled in the correct order.

Delivering authenticity and traceability in manufacturing

Smarter manufacturing also extends to component authentication, with tagging making it easier for Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) to prove that they’re using genuine parts. This is particularly important when it comes to sectors such as the automotive industry, which is governed by legislation that often shapes the quality of parts that can be used.

Airbags are just one example that need to be manufacturer approved and safety tested for respective markets. RAIN RFID tagging can make it easy to track components right back through the production process and supply chain, providing irrefutable proof of genuine parts. Tag ICs use cryptographically protected data to authenticate the tags. This is important for both the supply chain and the aftermarket sector, ensuring brand reputation, protecting manufacturer revenues and, critically, the safety of end users.

Shaping a smarter manufacturing future

In the future, we’re likely to see the performance of RAIN RFID solutions continue to improve.

As we progress, we’ll see greater complete system performance. Speeds of up to 1,000 tags per second are already possible, but greater accuracy and the possibility of tagging smaller and smaller components means that more items can be included in industrial RAIN RFID solutions. Some of these components can have a significant cost, therefore accurate and efficient visibility has the potential to make a big difference to businesses, more than justifying the price of RAIN RFID system implementation.

Factories are often set up around systems such as Kanban, where visual cues, including notes or updates on computers, are used to inform the status of inventories and production. Smarter RAIN RFID tagging technology can instead scan all parts throughout a build or production process, with the potential to automatically order and replenish stock precisely when necessary. Not every component in the manufacturing process is currently tagged, but thanks to increasing sensitivity, a much greater proportion of parts will be tagged in the future.

Ultimately, we could see entire factories being aware of every part within them, driving just-in-time (JIT) and just-in-sequence (JIS) manufacturing to entirely new levels, increasing efficiency and lowering costs for a smarter manufacturing industry.

[1] The RAIN Alliance is a consortium of companies that want to create a smarter and more sustainable world by using RAIN RFID technology to connect trillions of everyday items across their entire lifecycle, simply and inexpensively. rainrfid.org/mission-vision


About the author

James Goodland, Director of RAIN RFID Solutions, NXP Semiconductor.

Through close cooperation with company partners, James looks beyond the IC to facilitate full solution development and implementation. James has over 15 years of experience working with RFID technology on behalf of companies serving the entire value chain – including hardware manufacturers, systems integrators and end users. He has led RFID implementations for brand owners and end users across a variety of industries and markets.

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