Taiwanese Company Unveils EPC Gen 2 Chip With 128-kbit Memory

By Dave Friedlos

Sept. 12, 2008—Taiwanese startup company Favite RFID has unveiled a new UHF EPC Gen 2 inlay that it claims boasts the largest memory size and most competitive price available in the market.

The company is currently testing the FAVTAG UHF 1 RFID chip—which will provide its inlay with up to 128 kilobits of memory—in its laboratory, and intends to begin production early next year. This is part of Favite's expansion into the RFID market, which includes the establishment of a mass-production line for RFID antennas, inlays and tags, as well as the development of a low-cost ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) reader, a battery-free RFID remote control unit for TVs and DVD players, and anti-counterfeiting products—all to be released over the next two years.

According to Favite VP Mark Tseng, applications requiring significant memory space, such as temperature and moisture sensors, will benefit from the new chip, and from inlays made with it. The company will market the chip and inlays to businesses that transport perishable products, pharmaceuticals, biological samples (such as blood, tissue and plasma) and fresh produce.

"Another potential application is the airline baggage tag, which needs at least 1 kilobit of memory to store customer and airline information," Tseng says, explaining that companies developing airport baggage-handling applications have requested RFID inlays that support 1 kilobit of memory. "In addition, IATA [the International Air Transport Association] has requested that tags be read with a conveyor speed of 3.6 meters [11.8 feet] per second during baggage transportation, and the FAVTAG UHF 1 is the first tag that meets these requirements."

The FAVTAG UHF 1 chip provides the traditional benefits for EPC Gen 2 tags, including increased security (such as the prevention of data alteration), cross-vendor interoperability, high reliability of read rates, faster read and write rates, and reduced RF interference—but with improved memory and lower cost.

In addition to offering a 128-kilobit chip and inlay, Favite sells two inlays made with NXP Semiconductors' Ucode G2XM chip, which has 512 bits of user memory. Those inlays, the FT-G1201 and FT-G1202, will be targeted to current EPC Gen 2 applications, Tseng says, such as supply chain management, logistics, asset inventory and item-level tagging.