Evigia Launches 433 MHz Active RFID Product Line

Additionally, Ma says, Evigia participated in several compatibility and interoperability tests in 2007 to ensure its products would meet all of the specifications outlined in the ISO standard, as well as the requirements defined by the DOD. In June 2007, the firm, along with several other vendors, participated in lab trials conducted by the U.S. Army's Product Manager Joint-Automatic Identification Technology division at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Seattle.

Those lab tests, Ma explains, were designed to ensure that the products could perform basic functions, such as whether an interrogator could activate a transponder and exchange information with it. "Those lab tests asked very basic questions, but didn't look at how to make sure one vendor's interrogator talks with another vendor's tag," he says. "That was never resolved, so in November [2007], we answered the question, 'How do we make sure we are interoperable?' by testing our products with Savi's."

Evigia's Sensor Transponder enables companies to monitor, in near-real time, the environmental conditions of assets as they traverse the supply chain.

The interoperability tests were conducted at the RFID Center of Excellence in the University of Pittsburgh's Swanson School of Engineering. "The significance," Ma says, "is we believe that we [Evigia and Savi] are the only ones whose products can interoperate. You have to have a Savi tag be able to be read by an Evigia reader, and vice versa. If you don't do that—if you don't have interoperability—if the Army buys a half-million dollars worth of equipment from one vendor and another part of the DOD buys a half-million dollars worth of equipment from another vendor, how do you know they will work together?"

Although Evigia's products comply with all of the requirements in the DOD's RFP (which had an initial deadline of Sept. 3 that has since been moved to Sept. 10), the company has differentiated its products by putting all of the functionality for each product on a single silicon chip, or application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC). "With ASICS, that's how, for example, cell phones were able to be designed so small, compared to when they were first introduced," Ma explains. "And with an ASIC, power consumption goes down, costs go down, size goes down. So in that sense, we are different from Savi."

Because Evigia has not yet begun bidding on specific projects (other than the RFP), Ma is hesitant to reveal details regarding prices for its products, which are available now. "I could tell you," he says, "but I don't really want Savi to know."