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Disney Research has demonstrated that battery-free, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags can be used to cheaply and unobtrusively determine how people use and interact with daily objects, enabling new types of interactive play, smart homes and work environments, and new methods for studying consumer shopping habits.RFID tags are designed to simply report an identifying code when energized by an RFID reader, but a Disney Research team directed by Dr. Alanson Sample showed that the radio frequency signals transmitted by these tags provide a unique RF signature which can be used to determine whether a tagged item was being touched or moved.The researchers found that with their system, called IDSense, they could simultaneously track 20 objects in a room and infer four classes of movements with 93 percent accuracy. They will present their findings at CHI 2015, the Association for Computing Machinery's annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 18-23 in Seoul, South Korea."An effective means of identifying people's activities in their homes, schools and workplaces has the potential to enable a wide number of human-computer interaction applications," Sample said. "Whether it's reading a book to a child, cooking a meal or fixing a bicycle, the objects that we use both define and reflect the activities we do in our daily lives."One common approach has been to attach wireless sensors to objects, he noted, but the size of the sensors, their relatively high cost and the need for battery replacement has limited their applications. RFID tags, by contrast, are commercially available technology, cheap and easy to apply to a wide range of everyday objects.Sample, along with Disney Research's Can Ye and Hanchuan Li, a Ph.D. student in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington, employed ultra high frequency (UHF) RFID tags, which can return signals up to 10 meters. They found that by observing changes in the signals emitted by the tags - received signal strength indicator (RSSI), radio frequency (RF) phase and Doppler shift - they were able to make inferences about the object to which the tag was attached.RSSI is a measurement of signal power received at the receiver and is predominantly affected by the distance between the tag and the reader. RF phase - the angle between the carrier signal emitted by the RFID reader and the return signal from the tag - is sensitive to small changes in distance, while the Doppler shift is a radio frequency shift caused by the speed of a moving object."The key insight is that these low-level channel parameters represent a snap shot of the RF environment that is unique to each tag," Sample said. "By measuring changes in these signals over time we can infer how someone is interacting with the object."By using machine learning algorithms, which identify patterns in data, the researchers were able to associate changes in these communication parameters with certain states of the object, such as whether the object was still, whether the object was being rotated or moved, or whether the tag was covered, such as when the object was being held.The Disney team demonstrated how IDSense could be used by applying RFID tags to stuffed toys, enabling an interactive storytelling game in which rocking or petting a toy lion triggered actions by digital characters. In another demonstration, they used IDSense to monitor 10 commonly used items, such as a drinking glass, a milk container and a cereal box, to show how information about daily living activities could be gathered, and they showed that the tags could be used for studying the browsing behavior of consumers in a retail store.Reference:PCF7935AARI-TRP-IR2B-30RI-TRP-WR2B-30 

Fujitsu Semiconductor Europe today announced a new arrival to its FerVID family of chips for RFID tags. As with all members of the FerVID family, the MB89R112 series uses ferroelectric memory (FRAM) for fast write speeds, high-frequency rewritability, radiation tolerance and low-power operation. With industry-leading 9 KB memory, the series offers tailored solutions for factory automation and medical equipment as well as for embedded and industrial applications.  Since 2004, Fujitsu has developed FRAM products as part of the FerVID family with two frequency bands, for use as chips in high-functionality RFID tags operating in the HF band (13.56 MHz) and UHF band (860 to 960 MHz). Today, its products serve a wide range of applications, including chips for data-carrier tags in the factory automation and maintenance sectors, chips capable of withstanding gamma radiation or electron beams for the medical and pharmaceutical sectors, and chips with serial interfaces for embedded applications.The new MB89R112 series includes 9 KB of FRAM, the greatest density available in an RFID chip operating in the HF band as defined in ISO/IEC 15693. Of this 9 KB, 8 KB is provided as user memory, enabling access by read/write operations to the entire 8 KB region as defined in ISO/IEC 15693. The series will be offered in two variants, with 24pF and 96pF input capacitance. Writing 8 KB of data takes approximately four seconds, a high-speed operation that is six times faster than speeds achieved by E2PROM products. The greater data volume available on RFID tags enables greater efficiency for applications such as product lifecycle traceability management – from manufacturing to logistics, use and disposal – or on-site data logging for equipment maintenance records.The market is demanding higher-capacity memory, plus RFID connectivity to sensors and microcontrollers, so as to facilitate the wireless modification of product operating parameters or the logging of environmental factors during distribution. These features would benefit production control in automotive and electronics manufacturing, as well as maintenance applications in aviation, road-building, construction and civil engineering.The MB89R112QN products enable these features by supplementing the HF RFID interface with an additional SPI serial interface for microcontroller connectivity. Since the 8 KB of user memory in FRAM can be accessed from the microcontroller via SPI, shared memory regions can be used both for data logging and as a parametric area for changing the microcontroller's operating parameters.Application examples include logging environmental readings for logistics, detecting equipment errors, modifying electronic displays, altering sensor threshold values, changing firmware settings, plus many other novel and innovative applications that were previously unworkable. 

A new type of radio frequency identification (RFID) chip has been developed that is virtually impossible to hack.If such chips were widely adopted, it could mean that an identity thief couldn't steal your credit card number or key card information by sitting next to you at a café, and high-tech burglars couldn't swipe expensive goods from a warehouse and replace them with dummy tags.Texas Instruments has built several prototypes of the new chip, to the researchers' specifications, and in experiments the chips have behaved as expected. The researchers presented their research this week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, in San Francisco.According to Chiraag Juvekar, a graduate student in electrical engineering at MIT and first author on the new paper, the chip is designed to prevent so-called side-channel attacks. Side-channel attacks analyze patterns of memory access or fluctuations in power usage when a device is performing a cryptographic operation, in order to extract its cryptographic key."The idea in a side-channel attack is that a given execution of the cryptographic algorithm only leaks a slight amount of information," Juvekar says. "So you need to execute the cryptographic algorithm with the same secret many, many times to get enough leakage to extract a complete secret."One way to thwart side-channel attacks is to regularly change secret keys. In that case, the RFID chip would run a random-number generator that would spit out a new secret key after each transaction. A central server would run the same generator, and every time an RFID scanner queried the tag, it would relay the results to the server, to see if the current key was valid.BlackoutSuch a system would still, however, be vulnerable to a "power glitch" attack, in which the RFID chip's power would be repeatedly cut right before it changed its secret key. An attacker could then run the same side-channel attack thousands of times, with the same key. Power-glitch attacks have been used to circumvent limits on the number of incorrect password entries in password-protected devices, but RFID tags are particularly vulnerable to them, since they're charged by tag readers and have no onboard power supplies.Two design innovations allow the MIT researchers' chip to thwart power-glitch attacks: One is an on-chip power supply whose connection to the chip circuitry would be virtually impossible to cut, and the other is a set of "nonvolatile" memory cells that can store whatever data the chip is working on when it begins to lose power.For both of these features, the researchers—Juvekar; Anantha Chandrakasan, who is Juvekar's advisor and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Hyung-Min Lee, who was a postdoc in Chandrakasan's group when the work was done and is now at IBM; and TI's Joyce Kwong, who did her master's degree and PhD with Chandrakasan—use a special type of material known as a ferroelectric crystals.As a crystal, a ferroelectric material consists of molecules arranged into a regular three-dimensional lattice. In every cell of the lattice, positive and negative charges naturally separate, producing electrical polarization. The application of an electric field, however, can align the cells' polarization in either of two directions, which can represent the two possible values of a bit of information.When the electric field is removed, the cells maintain their polarization. Texas Instruments and other chip manufacturers have been using ferroelectric materials to produce nonvolatile memory, or computer memory that retains data when it's powered off.Complementary capacitorsA ferroelectric crystal can also be thought of as a capacitor, an electrical component that separates charges and is characterized by the voltage between its negative and positive poles. Texas Instruments' manufacturing process can produce ferroelectric cells with either of two voltages: 1.5 volts or 3.3 volts.The researchers' new chip uses a bank of 3.3-volt capacitors as an on-chip energy source. But it also features 571 1.5-volt cells that are discretely integrated into the chip's circuitry. When the chip's power source—the external scanner—is removed, the chip taps the 3.3-volt capacitors and completes as many operations as it can, then stores the data it's working on in the 1.5-volt cells.When power returns, before doing anything else the chip recharges the 3.3-volt capacitors, so that if it's interrupted again, it will have enough power to store data. Then it resumes its previous computation. If that computation was an update of the secret key, it will complete the update before responding to a query from the scanner. Power-glitch attacks won't work.Because the chip has to charge capacitors and complete computations every time it powers on, it's somewhat slower than conventional RFID chips. But in tests, the researchers found that they could get readouts from their chips at a rate of 30 per second, which should be more than fast enough for most RFID applications."In the age of ubiquitous connectivity, security is one of the paramount challenges we face," says Ahmad Bahai, chief technology officer at Texas Instruments. "Because of this, Texas Instruments sponsored the authentication tag research at MIT that is being presented at ISSCC. We believe this research is an important step toward the goal of a robust, low-cost, low-power authentication protocol for the industrial Internet."