There are another 257, 000 jobs at nine suppliers in the U.S. working on its behalf, such as Corning, Texas Instruments, Samsung, Fairchild Semiconductor and RF Micro Devices--as well as the drivers at UPS and FedEx who deliver Apple products to customers.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Retailers such as Wal-Mart are testing the RF tag idea to track inventory in transit, but the high cost per tag has been a problem.

FORBES: Touchy Circuits

Again, you have to deal with signal issues in high-RF noise environments, deal with materials issues acting as RF shields (like in many computer rooms or anything with lots of metal in it), and you have to balance the convenience with the somewhat-increased security risk.

FORBES: Got Wires?

RF, once touted as the ultimate home-networking standard, has been wiped out by Wi-Fi, but newer technologies such as ZigBee and ultrawideband are now in the running too.

ECONOMIST: MONITOR

In fact, Mitsumi says these can be integrated into the RF sensor network of large air conditioning facilities, as an RF transmitter can run on very little power these days -- even less than a calculator.

ENGADGET: Mitsumi exhibits micro-vibration power generator and batteryless RF switch (video)

The Archer module consists of the UltraGig 6400 single chip transmitter with its intelligent beam-forming 60GHz RF transceiver, embedded antenna array, and WirelessHD 1.1 compliant network processor as well as all necessary external components on a single, flex- print cable module.

ENGADGET: Silicon Image UltraGig 6400 WirelessHD, hands-on (video)