Company

Tego: Beyond ID

Smart Systems, Smart Assets — When RFID Gets IQ

Tego is a next-generation RFID solutions provider focused on high-memory applications that gather and store information on tagged assets. Pioneered in the aviation industry, our tags are the first that can carry entire life history maintenance records on aircraft parts wherever they go, accessible instantly on the spot through any standard RFID reader.

Tego solutions fundamentally change how RFID can be used. In aviation our products are solving a business problem that has plagued the industry for decades. The cost savings are measured in orders of magnitude as high-memory RFID applications utterly transform the game. No other technology and no other RFID products enable the business process improvements that Tego’s intelligent RFID brings about.

To most people RFID is a low-cost retail application, the wireless barcode. That is not Tego’s field. We are focused on RFID’s potential for unlocking information that surrounds real-world assets. By adding useful memory to an RFID tag, the invisible barcode becomes an invisible thumb drive.

Information can be attached to an asset for life. It can be accessed instantly, wirelessly, on the spot. Memory attached with RFID means that valuable intelligence can be pushed to the endpoints where it’s needed, without relying on data centers or network connectivity. RFID becomes a way for any myriad of things to be connected and synergistic in business systems – it allows useful information to be found in any context.

Ultimately RFID becomes a medium of distributed and pervasive data exchange. It could be described as social networking of assets: tags can talk to each other directly, they can be linked across business interests or they can behave as remote agents that gather, store and provide information wherever needed.

This is part of a larger trend in information technology. Organizations are developing smart systems that leverage distributed resources to enable more intelligent business processes. For example, regulatory compliance in many industries is becoming extremely complex – it requires new processes that can track and correlate item histories with people-intensive intangible knowledge. More intelligent RFID plays a role in smart systems by providing ownership of information that in many cases has never really lived anywhere – people have logged things on post-it notes and hoped they would stick.

The value of intelligent RFID is measured by its impact on business processes. The first four years of Tego’s product development were spent working with end users to understand applications and develop an architecture built around emerging requirements, evolving standards and smarter business models.

No other vendor has worked as closely with standards bodies and industry leaders to develop intelligent, practical RFID solutions. Tego is the leader in this field. Our vision is clear, and the applications that push RFID beyond it roots will be based on recognizably Tego-born capabilities.

Beyond ID

"Beyond ID" is Tego’s theme of RFID achieving more than barcode applications. The standards, protocols and systems that support RFID are actually aspects of a powerful wireless communications network that can now be exploited for more than just identification.

RFID’s origin goes back to the fundamental problem of keeping track of things. But it doesn’t help companies track important information about an object wherever it goes. When more detail is needed, it has to be indexed elsewhere in a database that may or may not be available. The ID-only use of RFID is limited by its reliance on centralized data:

• Centralized databases are maintained by organizations for their own purposes. Providing global access to outsiders is not the goal.
• There are times when database connections are unavailable. Reliability remains an issue, and in many situations connectivity may not exist at all.
• A more practical solution is to use high-memory RFID records physically attached to objects, and to synchronize that data with a centralized system whenever connectivity is available.

However, added-memory is just the start. We see RFID tags becoming very small computers-on-a-thing. The 32 Kbytes of memory in Tego’s chip is roughly eight times greater than the memory on guidance computers that once landed humans on the moon. What we now have is a self-powered PC embedded in an RFID tag.

Our tags are designed with on-board power harvesting technology that enables them to operate battery-free and to provide extra power for attached sensors, actuators and external displays. Tags with sensors can be used to monitor internal components of aircraft engines; they can be attached to structural elements buried in concrete; they can power wireless displays updated in real-time.

These are new possibilities that no other technology can deliver. Their impact and value across all industries is just starting to be realized. To put it in perspective we refer to what happened with the evolution of telephone networks. Telephones were not conceived with fax machines, computer data, video or IP telephony in mind. But the network infrastructure that started out carrying voice calls was leveraged and evolved to create today’s global connectivity.

Likewise, RFID tags and readers were developed for simple identification. They required a network scheme to connect them, and that has now set the stage for new capabilities beyond ID. Eventually RFID systems will not be used for labeling; they will deliver information anywhere, everywhere, here and now.