The latest big news in the RFID market is Smartcode's announcement that it received one of the world's largest orders for RFID tags, to supply MSWAYCO, a leading semiconductor distributor in Korea.

The order is for 100 million tags, designed to meet the needs of Korea's ambitious "ubiquitous computing" vision:

"The Ministry of Information and Communication (MIC) has unveiled the Ubiquitous-Sensor Network (USN) plan and said it would spend a total of 162.6 billion won until 2010 to develop and commercialize the RFID technology nationwide. The Korean ministry plans to inject 82 billion won into related research and development (R&D) activities and the remaining 63 billion won into pilot projects. The South Korea's Ministry of Information and Communication have also approved RFID systems to operate in the 908.5 MHz to 914 MHz band in Korea."

I wrote about Korea's ubiquitous computing vision a few weeks ago and pointed you to the Digiens@u-City blog containing a detailed description of that vision.

Smartcode is known for its small and inexpensive tags. If you want to see something interesting, go over to the Smartcode home page, and check out the animated Flash comparison of one of their chips on the face of a U.S. dime coin. To say the chip is small is an understatement.

Tags: RFID; business; ubicomp;