Alien Technology Releases Pre-encoded Higgs-4 Chip

Apr 03, 2012RFID tag manufacturer Alien Technology has announced that its Higgs-4 EPC Gen 2 IC is now commercially available. The new chip, Alien reports, will quadruple the speed of writing to tags, from approximately 1,000 to about 4,000 tags per minute. The faster speed, according to the company, should be a particular benefit to product manufacturers that apply item-level passive ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) RFID tags to their products destined for retailers. In addition, the Higgs-4 IC is being released with more features than initially planned by Alien's developers when the chip was announced nearly 12 months ago.

For example, the chip can be encoded faster than traditional tags, by means of a BlastWrite feature enabling a user to write to dozens or hundreds of tags in parallel at any given time. Enabling mass-encoding, the firm explains, allows a user to achieve a writing rate of up to 3,600 to 4,000 tags per minute. Typically, existing tags can be written to at a rate of up to 1,000 per minute.

QuickWrite provides "enhanced block-write" capability for situations in which a user does not wish to BlastWrite to tags, but would like to write multiple words to a single chip using a lone command. This speeds up Electronic Product Code (EPC) and memory initialization for brand owners looking to program tags one at a time.

What's more, the Higgs-4 IC supports a Multi-Vendor Chip-based Serialization (MCS) mechanism for generating a 38-bit EPC serial number based on each chip's Tag ID (TID), a unique number burned into the chip during manufacture (see Three RFID Chip Makers Agree of Serialization Approach). The MCS serialization scheme encodes bits 35, 36 and 37 (assuming counting from bit number 0, not bit number 1) in the EPC memory, in order to identify this EPC as an Alien serialized chip (as opposed to one provided by another manufacturer). The previous 35 bits (0 to 34) contain the EPC serial number. The Higgs-4 IC has the 38-bit serial number already encoded into the EPC fields, so a brand-owner need not encode it. Instead, a brand-owner can employ an RFID reader or printer to automatically generate a complete 96-bit EPC, consisting of that 38-bit serial number, plus additional bits that serve to identify the type of product being tagged, as well as the company that manufactured that item.

The California RFID chip and tag manufacturer first announced the development of the Higgs-4 IC in April 2011, with plans to make the new chip commercially available in September of last year (see Alien Technology Announces New IC, Handheld Readers and Inlays). However, says Neil Mitchell, Alien's VP of business development, the chip is being released six months later than initially planned, because the company wished to add greater functionality in order to speed up the chip's writing rate and provide pre-serialization.

For businesses that apply tags to their products and then write to those tags, Mitchell says, "one of the biggest headaches is serialization." Retailers with a wide range of tag suppliers are concerned with ensuring that there is no duplication in RFID tag numbers, and typically leave that responsibility in the hands of the product manufacturers. In addition, he says, goods manufacturers would benefit from being able to encode tags much more quickly than they are currently able to do. Alien chose to add the rapid-encoding features, Mitchell notes, in order to meet the needs of brand manufacturers tagging their products but hoping to do so without adding complexity to their existing manufacturing processes.

Although Alien was one of three companies developing the MCS system, it claims to be the first to release a chip incorporating the pre-serialization feature. Though the Higgs-4 chip comes pre-encoded with a 38-bit EPC serial number, brand owners are not required to use this serialization number. "If they prefer to use their own scheme and manage their own serialization scheme, they can... They simply over-write the pre-encoded 38-bit serial number with whatever 38-bit sequence they want," Mitchell says. But by doing so, he notes, a company would need "to ensure there are no duplicates and track these serialization across their web of suppliers and multiple sites generating serialized tags."

Additionally, the chip is designed with greater write sensitivity, enabling the encoding of each tag (with the remaining serial number unique to that tag) with about half the power required for writing to other tags currently available on the market.

The Higgs-4 IC also features security functionality known as Dynamic Authentication, to thwart tag cloning. The chip comes with what Mitchell refers to as a non-reproducible fingerprint built into every chip, for use on high-value items. A non-copy-able signature is read from each tag, and is used to identify it as a unique entity. This fingerprint can then be utilized to authenticate that the tag is, indeed, the same one read at some other point along the supply chain. "What is truly differentiating," he states, "is that if you tried to copy or clone this chip, and programmed the same EPC and TID serial numbers, the Dynamic Authentication fingerprint would be different." This allows for the simple detection of counterfeit goods, and is designed to thwart cloning.

According to Mitchell, Alien will initially provide the Higgs-4 chip in three of its existing tags: the Squigglette (ALN-9730), the Short (ALN-8762) and the Squiggle (ALN-9740). These models can be ordered now, with delivery expected in four to six weeks. He declines to indicate which tag manufacturers will offer RFID inlays made with the Higgs-4 ICs, but notes that most of Alien's existing tag-making customers can be expected to do so. Moreover, he adds, those tag providers have customers that are already pre-ordering the tags.

The Higgs-4 chip is less expensive than existing chips, Mitchell reports, which should lead to the availability of lower-priced tags. In part, the lower cost is possible due to a decrease in the chip's overall memory (512 bits, as opposed to the Higgs-3's 800 bits).

Alien Technology intends to continue marketing the Higgs-3 IC as well, Mitchell says, for users requiring the larger memory capacity.