Introduction

What do the U.S. Department of Defense, Wal-Mart, and you have in common? Radio frequency identification, or RFID! Whether you choose to know about it or not, RFID affects you and the world around you in a ubiquitous way. So, congratulations that you have chosen to learn about it.

The first thing to understand about RFID is that it is an application of physics to the extent that the core functioning of RFID technology is governed by the laws of physics. You don t need to have a Ph.D. in physics to become a successful RFID professional, but an understanding of the physics of RFID will enable you to design, deploy, and operate RFID systems in an optimal way. In this chapter, we attempt to ease your way into physics as it relates to RFID by explaining some basic physics concepts. As they say, mathematics is the language of physics, or of any science for that matter. The good news is that you need only very simple math to understand RFID: powers of 10, logarithms, and some unit conversions. Before you dive into the book, we take a bird s-eye view of RFID in this chapter. The goal is to provoke you to start asking questions about the details that will be addressed in the forthcoming chapters.

The overall goal of this chapter is to help you avoid falling into the gaps between physics, math, and RFID. We fill those gaps by exploring three avenues: basic physics concepts, the math of...