By Jennifer Zaino

Aug. 1, 2010—You've heard of extreme sports, fitness, music, even makeovers. Now you can add extreme RFID to the list. Today, some RFID tags are designed to withstand extreme temperatures, harsh chemicals, pounding pressure, dust, rain, shock and other hazardous environmental conditions. And these "rugged" tags are helping companies in a wide range of industries—including chemical, construction, industrial laundry, manufacturing, oil and gas, utility and waste management—achieve benefits that just a few years ago seemed impossible.

Given today's extreme market competition, it's not surprising that many manufacturers claim the "rugged" title for their RFID tags. But for this report, a tag is rugged only if it is durable in harsh environments where assets, often containing metal or liquid, require tracking.

Illustration: John Hull

"A rugged tag can withstand shock, rain, dust, light immunity, oil and chemical resistance, solar tolerance, humidity [and/or] extreme temperatures," says Neelima Sagar, a Frost & Sullivan senior research analyst. "It can handle hazardous chemicals and can withstand temperatures of minus 50 degrees to 250 degrees Fahrenheit [minus 10 degrees to 121 degrees Celsius]." Some tags are designed to tolerate even more heat. Tag packaging also may be optimized for mechanical robustness, Sagar notes, so each tag can be reused hundreds of times in physically demanding environments, or be embedded in the asset for the life of the equipment.