Fascinating. I’m looking forward to seeing it in action. Thoughts?
If I understand this correctly, what it is doing is activating the passive RFID transponder which gives it the information needed to negotiate a wireless power transfer and data connection to a sensor attached to it. Pretty clever.
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Basically it’s an extension to UHF RFID protocols which will allow for data streaming where current UHF protocol is strictly a response protocol. Current systems ping out a blast of RF and tags absorb some energy and “ring back” or backscatter a response which contains some small amount of digital information - typically the ID of the UHF transponder. There are issues with response timings, collisions, etc. but given the small amount of data being transmitted by the transponders you can still have upwards of 250+ transponders respond to a single interrogator without much issue.
The proposal here is to extend the protocol to allow for continuous energy supply from the “interrogator” and data streaming from multiple transponders. I find it interesting it looks as though they are likely to lean pretty heavily on the bistatic approach where a primary power delivery source is emitting very stable RF energy to the transponders but the response (data stream) from the transponders will likely be picked up by other receive-only RF receivers. The key here is stable power.. without that it would be very difficult to productively stream data from one or more transponders. One way to achieve stability is to not have to stop transmitting in order to receive a response from transponders in range.
Definitely interested to see where this goes, but honestly it’s not all that ground breaking of a concept.. inductive passive transponders have been doing this forever.. it’s just never been done at a workable distance with UHF before.
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