Although  the importance of passive RFID technology for the use in mass market applications like retail and logistics is obvious, RFID covers a broad area of technologies with different physical properties and limits. Users, legislation bodies, citizens, and Non-Governmental Organisations are often not aware of the basic technological conditions of RFID which might result in a misunderstanding of the benefits, costs, and risks of RFID. Frequently, properties of different RFID technologies are combined incorrectly (e.g. low cost 5-cent-tag and reading ranges up to 100 metres), leading to wrong expectations of RFID performance.

The CE RFID report "A Roadmap for RFID Application and Technologies" presents a basic overview of the RFID technologies currently available on the market together with their specifications. It investigates major international R&D activities that have been published so far with respect to RFID and identifies present gaps and bottlenecks that still need to be overcome in order to support broad implementation of RFID technologies. Based on the findings, a timeline of future RFID developments and a possible RFID roadmap are being outlined.

These results were achieved in cooperation with EPOSS,
the European Technology Platform on Smart Systems Integration.