Tageos and Auburn University: Reasons to Party Together

Auburn University’s Spring Commencement Ceremony 2022

The world of RFID gravitates around the RFID Lab at Auburn University. The opportunity to provide Auburn University’s Spring Commencement Ceremony 2022 with RFID inlays as a customer is hence a privilege and an honor, as well as a challenge. This May, it was bestowed upon the latest ARC Advisory Board member: Tageos.

If you are familiar with RFID, you have come across Auburn University, its RFID Lab and, of course, the ARC Specifications it provides. In addition to its important role in the RFID industry and beyond, Auburn University is the home of the “Auburn Tigers” athletic teams, and, most important, a highly renowned university with a particularly sound reputation in the fields of architecture, economics, and engineering. As such, Auburn University hosts a grand graduation celebration (known as a “commencement” in the US) for some 4,500 graduates of its Undergraduate, Master and Ph.D. Studies at the end of each half term.

Better flow and information in the course of the celebration

For three years, the university has leveraged its expertise to incorporate RFID technology in these celebrations. For the latest edition held on May 6 & 7, all graduates received two personalized, RFID-enabled name badges – based on EOS-300 inlays from Tageos. These badges played a distinctive role during the celebrations, as they triggered several actions in the COVID-19 compliant no-touch manner required.

First, the cards were used during the commencement ceremony, and then played an important role in the picture-taking process.

On entering the stage to receive their diplomas, students passed by a reader and their name simultaneously appeared on a large screen for the entire audience to see – avoiding any name confusion and potentially embarrassing delays.

Auburn University’s Spring Commencement Ceremony 2022

In addition, the information gathered via RFID was used to build a log that provides the professional photographers with a valid list giving the actual order in which the photos were taken. Following the event, students could simply present their badges at a contactless reader to order their individual photos easily.

The right inlay from the right supplier

While not the most complex or extensive RFID implementation imaginable, it is for sure an honor for every inlay manufacturer to supply their products to the hosting university of the ARC program. The latter's goal, after all, is “to ensure that RFID tags are able to meet or exceed the levels of performance and quality necessary to provide benefit to the end user in a consistent and cost-effective manner.”

The required “levels of performance and quality” were delivered by EOS-300 U8 inlays from Tageos, which combine the compact size and flawless performance required for the application. In addition, it surely helped that Tageos is closely connected to Auburn. The RFID powerhouse is not only a long-time supporter of Auburn University’s ARC program and one of the very few inlay manufacturers to have obtained ARC Quality Certification for the design and manufacturing of its RFID inlays and tags. Effective July 1, Tageos joined Auburn University RFID Lab’s advisory board, taking the company’s long-standing commitment to new heights.

EOS 300 U8: Cost-effective global solution for a wide range of applications

Used slightly off its typical application areas by Auburn University, the EOS-300 U8 inlay from Tageos (in the specific case the EOS 300E-U8-W-002 version) is optimized within a compact form factor that is ideal for retail hang tags and logistics packaging. It has excellent orientation sensitivity and performs extremely well on a wide range of materials in dense tagging environments. As such, it is an ideal low-cost solution for inventory control in non-food industries such as retail, logistics, and supply chain management.

The inlay is perfect for large-scale, worldwide deployments, since it is a small, universal tag that can operate globally, simplifying the tag supply chain for multinational enterprises.

EOS-300 uses NXP’s UCODE 8 IC, which offers high performance across all global frequency standards. Particularly well suited for inventory management applications with its proven RF performance for any given form factor, UCODE 8 enables a long read distance and fast inventory of dense RFID tag populations.