To meet the needs of airplane manufacturers and their parts suppliers, a growing number of RFID vendors are releasing passive EPCGen 2 RFID tags with 4 or 8 kilobytes of memory, to store historic data regarding parts. Airbus is scheduled to complete its A350 XWB wide-body, for which the company is requiring that most flyable parts be tagged with high-memory EPC Gen 2 RFID tags for maintenance-tracking purposes. Each A350 is expected to have 3,000 tagged parts, 2,000 of which will be fitted with high-memory tags. The planes are expected to be put into service in 2013, so parts suppliers are seeking RFID tags that will help them meet those demands soon.
