High-frequency 13.56 MHz RFID for industrial applications, secure payment, and authentication.
In the RFID world, the term HF stands for “high frequency” and refers to all RFID systems that operate at a frequency of 13.56 MHz. The technology has existed since the 1990s and is therefore used in a wide range of applications. Due to the relatively low frequency, the range is limited from a few cm to up to 1 m – but this is not a problem for many applications, since a high range is not always required.
HF RFID is particularly widespread in automation technology used inside factories, in the area of rental textiles (although here there is an increasing shift towards UHF RFID), and in many embedded applications in vending machines, etc.
A special subset of HF RFID is the Mifare protocol family, which was developed by NXP. This comprises several communication standards with varying degrees of security features. These HF transponders are therefore mainly used in payment applications and access systems. They have a higher degree of security but the read range is much lower due to the increased energy demands of the transponders.
In recent years, cell phone manufacturers have also added NFC technology and it has quickly become the most popular form of RFID. NFC also works based on 13.56 RFID and defines a standardized format for data storage. This means that most HF RFID transponders can be read and written with a cell phone and at the same time an HF RFID reader/writer can also read and write an NFC tag.
