Press Release

What’s the Difference Between NFC and RFID?

In the contactless industry, we often hear that people talk about the difference between NFC and RFID. However, there are both differences and similarities between them, so it is easy to have differences in the process of argument. Then, we will briefly discuss the differences between them from the perspective of application.

April 29, 2021

In the contactless industry, we often hear that people talk about the difference between NFC and RFID. However, there are both differences and similarities between them, so it is easy to have differences in the process of argument. Then, we will briefly discuss the differences between them from the perspective of application.

After a few years of development, RFID technology has been widely used in retail, warehousing and logistics, aviation, books, medical and other fields, which is closely related to our life. However, relatively speaking, the public are often more familiar with NFC technology, because the smart phones are basically equipped with this technology, which is easy to use in daily situations such as payment, pay for the bus, subway tickets and so on.

NFC has a close relationship with RFID technology, NFC technology is evolved from RFID technology. We can even understand NFC as a subset of RFID technology, and its13.56MHz frequency band it uses is the specific frequency band of high frequency RFID.

We can make a distinction between the two in terms of function. RFID can read and determine data, while NFC technology emphasizes information interaction, which is more flexible and bidirectional.

From the perspective of application scenarios, we can find out that there are obvious differences between RFID and NFC. RFID and NFC are respectively oriented to different specific applications: RFID is based on commodities, while NFC is based on user interactive operation, which requires the participation of users

The RFID tag is pasted on the specified items, so that the items can be taken the data information, so that they can report their identity and other information to the computer network, which is the cornerstone of RFID technology to achieve more data processing functions.

NFC has a very short range of action, the general working range is within 0.1 meters, is a user interactive technology, needs the user's special participation to ensure the completion of functions such as payment or access.

In practical application, RFID scanner can read a large number of tags at the same time, which is very common in warehouse inventory. RFID is more used in production, logistics, retail, tracking and asset management. NFC is generally one-to-one, and the transmission range of NFC is much shorter than that of RFID. Therefore, NFC technology plays a huge role in access control, public transportation, mobile payment and other fields.

In fact, the application scenarios of RFID technology are far more extensive than NFC, and it can even be said that RFID includes NFC. However, due to the differences in functional characteristics between RFID and NFC, they basically do not form a competitive relationship, but play a role in their respective application scenarios.

Fdata, as a customized solution provider in fintech payment and contactless industry, we offer a variety of hardware integration solutions. It includes design, development and manufacturing.

For further information, please check on www.fdatapos.com