News

Next-gen RFID tags debut

April 4, 2005

InformationWeek: Impinj has announced it will ship RFID tags based on the new Gen 2 specification, which can boost read rates up to five times faster than the current specs. Gen 2-based tags can be rewritten multiple times, and they're hardier: They can avert interference caused by multiple readers. Impinj also is shipping new multiprotocol readers, which can scan tags based on Gen 2 and the Class-0 and Class-1 protocols. Unilever, UPS and Qualcomm co-founder Andrew Viterbi are investors in the new chips, said William Colleran, Impinj's president and CEO. "Unilever and UPS will be some of the early testers," he said, adding that the company already has orders for the new chips and expects to ship several million units a month. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. semiconductors are being used to manufacture the tags. In many cases, consumer-goods companies will have to upgrade to Gen 2 when the new technology becomes widely available to meet requirements laid out by Wal-Mart and other companies. Most suppliers have been buying "upgradeable" readers and may only need to make minor adjustments to their equipment to use the Gen 2 tags, said Jeff Woods, VP of enterprise and supply-chain-management research at Gartner. "That's if - and this is a big if - the [firmware software] upgrades work as advertised" by the vendors, Woods said. "There are substantial differences between the Gen 1 and Gen 2 technology. It isn't clear that everyone's equipment will work with Generation 2." For example, he said, reader performance might degrade as the users move to Gen 2. Executives should ask their vendors if the readers and encoders will work with the Gen 2 protocol at the same performance levels, Woods said. Click here to read the full story.