Impinj, a Seattle-based supplier of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips and readers, announced it had achieved 100% reliability when reading and writing tags at high speed on pharmaceutical bottles.
The RFID Health Care Industry Adoption Summit is meeting this week in Washington, D.C. and Impinj is a proponent of a near-field UHF Gen 2 RFID chips (Q&A) that uses 900 MHz.
Multi-vendor interoperability has always the vision for UHF Gen 2 devices along with backward compatibility. The Gen 2 devices are said to be more accurate and secure. Impinj has been the world’s only producer of the latest generation of chips.
The technology is quickly taking off as retailers like Wal-Mart and Target, mandate their vendors to use them. Wal-Mart is phasing out the use of Gen 1 RFID tags for Gen 2 devices. The pharmaceutical industry is also embracing RFID tags for labeling prescription drugs. They want to prevent cheaper Canadian drugs from coming into the United States.
Rite Aid has been tracking of Viagra, as part of a pilot involving McKesson. The bottle tags operate at 13.56 MHz using Philips ICode chips, while the case tags operate at the 915 MHz and comply with the EPC Gen 1 protocol.
Gen 2 tags, using the UHF band, centered around 900 MHz, are expected to overcome many limitations of older Class 0 and Class 1 technologies using the same frequency.
The Class 0 and Class 1 RFID protocols, saw significant commercial implementation in 2002-2005, but the Class 1 Generation 2 interface is likely to form the backbone of RFID tag standards moving forward. EPCglobal simplified the Babel of protocols and developed international standards with EPC Gen2, short for EPCglobal UHF Class 1 Generation 2. It was adopted with minor modifications as ISO 18000-6C in 2006.
Impinj helped write the standards, writes the Seattle Times, and moved quickly to put the first chips on the market. Customers have ordered a billion so far.
Impinj has most of its chips produced by Taiwan Semiconductor, one of its investors. Now Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics and Philips are entering the market.
EPCglobal leads the development of industry-driven standards for the Electronic Product Code (EPC) for RFID. But there is no global public body that governs the frequencies used for RFID, says Wikipedia. In principle, every country can set its own rules. Most use unlicensed frequency bands.
Low-frequency (125 - 134.2 kHz and 140 - 148.5 kHz) and high-frequency (13.56 MHz) RFID tags can be used globally without a license.
UHF Tags (868 MHz-928 MHz), cannot be used globally as there is no single global standard. In North America, UHF can be used unlicensed for 902 - 928 MHz, but restrictions exist for transmission power.
In Europe, UHF is under consideration for 865.6 - 867.6 MHz. Its usage is currently unlicensed for 869.40 - 869.65 MHz only. The North American UHF standard is not accepted in France as it interferes with its military bands.
“Let’s say you’re paying a company in China to make a million pairs of tennis shoes,” said Impinj CEO William Colleran in The Times. “Nothing prevents them from making another set indistinguishable from the real thing.” An RFID tag can be used to authenticate the product. “If you’re selling a $100 pair of Nikes, it’s worth 20 cents to you,” he said.
Privacy advocates have opposed RFID in consumer items because each chip has a unique identification number that could be read surreptitiously. The new standard that Impinj helped write includes a way to “kill” an RFID tag permanently at the point of sale.
But retailers are not always informing customers a tag is present.
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