Nov 12, 2007RFID systems provider Tagsys has announced the Medio L400 reader, designed to enable end-user companies to leverage the high-frequency (HF) RFID tag specification—dubbed HF Version 2 (V2), or Generation 2—currently being developed and groomed for ratification by EPCglobal. Elie Simon, Tagsys' president and CEO, says the EPCglobal board of directors may ratify the standard as soon as early next year, as an alternative to EPCglobal's current ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) standard. HF tags have a shorter read range than UHF, but have been shown to be less susceptible to RF interference from metal and liquids (see EPCglobal Developing HF Tag Standard).
Both Tagsys and NXP Semiconductors are represented in the EPCglobal Hardware Action Group, which is developing and defining the HF V2 candidate specification. Jan-Willem Reynaerts, NXP's general manager of RFID, says tests results of the current tag standard specification, using a tag emulator, have been encouraging. Tagsys is now working with NXP to develop the first Tagsys HF V2 tag, which will use an NXP chip and is expected to become available sometime next year.
Tagsys' Medio L400 reader is designed to provide a bridge to the upcoming standard for companies that have already deployed an HF RFID system using any of the three other tag formats the reader can encode and read: NXP's HF Icode 1 and Icode UID tag formats, and the ISO 15693 standard. Once the EPCglobal HF tag becomes widely available, users of the Medio L400 can migrate to the tags via a firmware upgrade.
According to Simon, the Medio L400 offers several improvements over previous Tagsys readers. These include a set of 50 parameter settings that can be used to improve the reader's performance in various working conditions. For example, Simon explains, the interrogator contains an integrated temperature monitor that it uses to calibrate its power levels to the ambient temperature.
Temperature impacts a reader's performance, says Maria Kaganov, Tagsys' product marketing manager. "We had a customer that was having trouble with a Tagsys reader installed in a distribution center," she says. "Employees would turn it on in the morning, but for about two hours, it would not work correctly. They swapped out the hardware, but the same thing [happened]. We finally realized that the reason for the poor performance was the low temperature in the DC, since the building was cold at night and took a couple hours to warm up."
Tagsys and NXP are demonstrating the reader with working emulators of the candidate HF V2 tag at this week's NACDS 2007 RFID/Track & Trace Summit in Washington, D.C. At the show, Tagsys announced a partnership with NXP to develop an HF V2 tag, as well as the aforementioned agreement with IBM to offer an HF tagging startup kit. IBM claims the kit can help pharmaceutical companies coming under mandates such as California's drug pedigree regulations, slated to go into effect Jan. 1, 2009, which require that all drugs sold in the state be serialized and tracked through the supply chain using an electronic pedigree (e-pedigree) to more easily identify and remove counterfeit drugs from the supply chain.
The kit, known as the Serialization Pilot Kit, consists of 50,000 HF Tagsys tags converted to the customer's label specifications—users can avail themselves of current tags models and migrate to the HF V2 tags once they become available—as well as 1,000 UHF tags that can be used for case-level serialization. Also included is the use of a UHF RFID printer-encoder and the Medio L400 interrogator and antennas (the hardware that comes with the kit is not purchased by the end user; it is loaned to the end user for the duration of the pilot), along with mounting equipment for adding the reader to a packaging line. The kit also includes the use of HF/UHF reading stations so HF-tagged drug containers can be associated with UHF-tagged cases used to transport them.
The kit incorporates IBM's WebSphere Premises Server software to manage the RFID hardware and tag data, as well as generate serialization reports that can be sent to e-pedigree software for tracking purposes. According to IBM, all necessary services required to install and configure the system for optimal performance are packaged in the startup kit, which costs $125,000 and includes training and installation. IBM says the kit will be available starting in December and can be deployed in under four weeks. The Medio L400 reader, meanwhile, can be purchased on a stand-alone basis for $2,000.
