Nov 28, 2007This article was originally published by RFID Update.
November 28, 2007—Magellan Technology wants to help organizations take file tracking to another level with its suite of products. Magellan says its high frequency RFID tags, tray readers, and file cabinet readers are accurate enough to identify individually tagged documents, not just the file folders that hold them, even when hundreds of documents are stacked together.
"For document management applications, most other technologies go on folders, not individual documents," Magellan Technology CEO Bodo Ischebeck told RFID Update. "We are concentrating on applications where users need to identify things that are stacked. That includes single-page documents."
Magellan's document management products are based on phase jitter modulation (PJM) high frequency RFID technology. PJM differs from common HF and UHF in the way it manipulates radio waves for communication. Most RFID systems, including popular ISO 15693 standard and I*CODE 13.56 MHz products, use amplitude shift keying (ASK) and modulate the wave over one channel. Magellan's PJM technology uses phase shift keying (PSK) and spreads the RF signal over eight channels. The tags are also untuned and operate in a frequency band that fluctuates from 10 MHz to 17 MHz, which improves their anti-collision performance. The result is faster read-write speeds and improved ability to differentiate and identify tags that are close together.
Magellan took advantage of these characteristics to develop systems for document reading. Its product line includes the MDOCR-2505 document tray reader, MARS-24 reader for shelves and cabinets, and MSTRP-5050 tunnel reader, which all read the company's PJM StackTags.
The MDOCR-2505 looks like a document in/out tray and can read up to 100 documents stacked within it. The MARS-24 reader for shelves and cabinets can accept input from up to 24 antennas to monitor 100,000 documents with a single reader. The MSTRP-5050 is used to identify files and documents packed in records boxes. It can inventory 10,000 tagged items in a few seconds.
Non-PJM systems can't process the same volumes or densities, according to Ischebeck. He said many of Magellan Technology's customers are skeptical about its claims because they tried other RFID document management systems and were disappointed, but its technology is winning acceptance and customers in financial services and government sectors with high paperwork volumes.
Australia-based Magellan Technology is primarily marketing the systems in Asia and Europe, and currently serves the US through partners. It plans to increase US marketing efforts, but Ischebeck said the company must overcome a technology bias there. The company has received limited interest in its recently announced technology licensing program.
"The US market is fundamentally different in that most people want to start with UHF Gen2. It seems to be the only technology that's considered," Ischebeck said. See Hospital Manages Thousands of Patient Files with RFID and Recall Uses RFID to Make Records Auditing Possible for two user profiles that support this point.
Read the document management suite announcement from Magellan
