Bob Trebilcock

Zebra jumps into the UWB market

How do you know when an emerging technology is on the verge of going mainstream? When mainstream technology players start to get in the act.

That’s one way to look at the recent acquisition of Multispectral Solutions (MSSI), a leading provider of Ultra Wideband RFID (UWB) technology, by Zebra Technologies.

I find the deal interesting for a couple of reasons. First, up until about 18 months ago, Zebra was primarily known as a hardware company, selling bar code printers and encoders for passive RFID tags. That all changed in January 2007, when Zebra purchased WhereNet, one of the early entrants in real-time location systems (RTLS). While there’s more than one way to get the job done, WhereNet’s RTLS solutions use active RFID tags to track the location of mobile assets to within six or so feet or of their location. While RTLS solutions had been around for some time, they were really coming into their own about the time of that deal. With that purchase, Zebra began turning itself into a solutions company. Since then, it has also purchased Navis and proveo, two other companies that provide tracking solutions. 

Second, for the past eight months, I’ve been hearing about how UWB technology uses active tags that send out short pulse radio waves at a higher bandwidth than other solutions to track the location of assets with much more precision—down to a few inches. But most of my conversations have been with start-up firms looking for funding and their first customer. I’m not a technologist, but the fact that a company the size of Zebra is interested in MSSI and UWB would seem to validate the concept.

That was certainly the point Phil Gerskovich, Zebra’s senior vice president of corporate development, made when we spoke earlier this month. “Zebra has been building a portfolio of RFID technologies,” Gerskovich told me. “First we brought passive printer encoders to the market. Then we got into active RFID with WhereNet because it had been around for about ten years, was very reliable, and would support a number of our customers. Now, we’re seeing an opportunity for applications that require greater accuracy. The way to do that is with ultra wide band.”

Gerskovich said MSSI already has a presence in chemical manufacturing and the oil refinery business, where it’s used as part of a worker safety program. But Gerskovich sees opportunities opening up in industrial settings. “One area that we think is pretty exciting is an inline manufacturing environment, where you’re making something down a conveyor belt or an assembly line,” says Gerskovich. “You need very accurate information to automatically turn drills on and off or to get a wrench to put torque on something. You can do that with sensors, but it’s not very flexible. With UWB RFID, you can not only identify which object is coming down the line, you can track its location to within a foot or less.”

Another UWB provider recently told me about an aircraft components manufacturer that is testing the technology to line up very large parts during the manufacturing process. While the technology is still in the testing stage in manufacturing, I’m going to be keeping my eye open for the first commercial application in an industrial setting.

Posted by Bob Trebilcock on May 13, 2008 | Comments (0)