A group of technology providers and global RFID manufacturers, jointly represented as the Performance Team, have submitted a candidate RFID UHF Generation 2 air interface protocol to EPCglobal for ratification and adoption. The submission proposal is said to meet all the stated requirements of the EPC user community.
The Performance Team includes Atmel Corp.'s German subsidiary Atmel Germany GmbH, BTG plc, EM Microelectronic-Marin, Matrics Inc. and RFID Solutions Ltd. This submission marks the merger of the original submissions by the Performance and the Flexworks team members.
The protocol was designed to provide the best possible performance in narrow band regulatory jurisdictions such as Europe and the Far East while maintaining optimum performance where more spectrum is available such as in the US, Canada and Australia.
An important guiding principle of the protocol is that team members have made their intellectual property (IP) available, free of any royalties, for incorporation into the standard. The Performance Team has designed the standard to avoid using IP from any other known patents, thus negating the need to negotiate licenses and pay royalties. As a result, this protocol provides a free and secure means to access tags through the use of a password controlled challenge/response mechanism and encryption of reader to tag communications.
Another guiding principle was to make the protocol "future proof." While the core protocol is optimized for Generation 2 Class 1, it provides the necessary elements to support future Class 2 and Class 3 tagging systems as envisaged by the EPC user community. A further guiding principle ensures that existing Generation 1 Class 0, Class 1 and ISO18000-6A systems may be upgraded seamlessly to Generation 2. Generation 1, 2 and ISO18000-6A tags may be operated simultaneously in the same environment, which will provide users a smooth, forward migration path.
