Intel Announces UHF Reader Radio Chip

"A number of reader manufacturers are building products with the R1000 today," explains Kerry Krause, marketing director for Intel's RFID business unit, "and we should have 20 customers [reader makers] by end of year."

Cambridge, Mass., RFID reader manufacturer ThingMagic announced today its Mercury5e—a reader module that uses the R1000 and is designed to be embedded into handheld computers or printer-encoders. The Mercury5e is set to be available in production quantities in early May and will be made available in products sold by ThingMagic's network of resellers, which include NCR, Omron and Zebra.

The Mercury5e is significantly smaller and consumes less energy than its predecessor, the Mercury4e, says Kevin Ashton, ThingMagic's vice president of marketing. When not being used for a predetermined length of time, the Mercury5e goes into a sleep mode, much like a PC, which enables it to conserve energy. Ashton says this function should enable a worker to use a handheld with the reader module for 8 to 10 hours, depending on how often it is used and whether the handheld also has other power-consuming functions, such as bar-code scanning.

Alien Technology, an RFID hardware manufacturer based in Morgan Hill, Calif., says it, too, plans on incorporating the R1000 into variety of reader products. Alien's current product line does not include RFID-enabled handheld computers.

While the R1000 firmware does not support the ISO 18000-6B standard, Krause says some of the reader makers using the chip are adding their own support for this passive UHF air-interface protocol.

These products are likely to come in a number of form factors, he says, from compact handheld readers to fixed readers and reader modules for printer-encoders.