Active RFID will account for more than a quarter of the total RFID market this year, a research by UK consultancy, IDTechEx, revealed. The RFID market is forecast to reach $7.07 billion this year, plus $0.44 billion if the market for cell phone RFID modules is included.

The rapid growth of the RFID market is driven by, among other things, strong market demand for tracking, locating and monitoring assets and people; a reduction in the cost and size of the tags and systems; the development of Ubiquitous Sensor Networks (USN); the availability of open standards; and the leveraging of many popular forms of short range wireless communication.

The study said that by the beginning of 2007, 614 million active RFID tags had been sold, the vast majority of which are used for car clickers (593 million). The second biggest use for active RFID has been by the military, with 6.3 million active RFID tags in use to date.

In 2007, almost two-thirds of the spend on active RFID will be on the system (reader, network, installation, software), as opposed to the tags themselves. This changes as the number of tags per application increases, and by 2017 the spend on everything other than tags will be 57.3 percent.

With more than 100 companies now involved in some part of the active RFID value chain, and considerable government fi nancing of research on low cost active RFID, unit prices will drop. The price erosion will drop even more rapidly with the emergence of new technologies, such as new microbatteries and printed logic.

In IDTechEx’ analysis of 75 active RFID case studies from eighteen countries, the largest number of projects has been in the logistics industry, with around double the number for each of the nearest contenders – the air industry, automotive/transportation and