i. Tags

• Tags can be active (with watch-sized battery) or passive (without battery). Passive tags take power from the RF field of the interrogating antenna.
• The size of the tag varies from less than 1 square inch to many square inches.
• The size is dependent on power and frequency (13.56 MHz, 433 MHz, 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz with power from 1 mW to 1 W)
• Memory can be read only, write one and read many with 1 byte to 512 Kilo-bytes storage.

ii. Reader

• The reader receives data, validates it and even writes data onto the tag through RFID antenna.

iii. Host data management software applications

• The data read from the tag can be passed to the host computer.
• The application software on the host processes the data, and may perform various filtering operations to reduce the numerous often redundant reads of the same tag to a smaller and more useful data set.