The International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI) has announced plans to sponsor a forum intended to focus industry attention on RFID technology. The meeting is scheduled for Oct. 4, 2005 at the Sun Microsystems facility in Newark, CA. RFID has been a hot topic for several years, not only in the electronics industry, but in other segments as well. Some organizations (Wal-Mart, DoD) are already making significant investments to implement RFID. However, skeptics argue that RFID is analogous to an expensive barcode and may never reach the promised return on investment, which in turn means it will never achieve broad deployment. Still others believe that RFID will continue to struggle until a "killer application" is demonstrated. All agree that significant work is needed to improve the technology (including cost reduction) and to build the infrastructure required to make RFID ubiquitous. The iNEMI forum is intended to: assess the current state of the industry and understand the potential of RFID; identify key barriers limiting adoption; and develop an action plan for addressing those barriers. Speakers will include RFID practitioners from AMR Research, EDS, Intel, Motorola, Sun Microsystems, ThingMagic and VeriSign.

For more information, visit www.inemi.org/cms/calendar/RFID_Forum.html.