Patent ID: 8253567

Claim:
A method of life cycle management of components, comprising: providing a passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tag, the passive RFID tag comprising a substrate and a plurality of RF network nodes mounted on the substrate of the tag, wherein at least one of the plurality of RF network nodes is in electronic communication with at least one another of the plurality of RF network nodes, wherein at least one of the plurality of RF network nodes is in data communication with a memory location within the RFID tag, and wherein at least one other of the plurality of RF network nodes is in data communication with a memory location different from said memory location within the RFID tag; coordinating data communicated between the plurality of RF network nodes such that the plurality of RF network nodes communicate data from the different memory locations upon interrogation of the RFID tag by an RFID reader, wherein said step of coordinating comprises coordinating information storage across the plurality of RF network nodes in a manner such that the plurality of RF network nodes acts as a single large memory location; and associating the passive RFID tag with a component, wherein the life cycle of the component is managed in association with information stored in the different memory locations.