At a two-day technology demonstration event last week, hosted by EPCglobal, 23 RFID technology vendors used passive tags, operating at the 125 kHz low-frequency (LF), the 13.56 MHz high-frequency (HF) or the 902 to 928 MHz ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) band, to demonstrate seven distinct item-level tracking scenarios. The goal was to determine which frequency bands would be best suited for tagging items—as opposed to cases and pallets—and whether new air-interface protocol standards need to be created to meet the requirements for item-level tagging.
“The amount of effort all the RFID technology vendors put into the event was amazing,” says Sue Hutchinson, facilitator for EPCglobal’s Item-Level Tagging Joint Requirements Group. “The demonstrations were as realistic as possible.”
In total, 150 people attended the event, including representatives from 44 end user companies, who came to observe, and another 30 from EPCglobal’s air-interface working group.
“We had a very broad representation of end-user companies,” says Hutchinson, “including manufacturers [of consumer-packaged goods and pharmaceuticals], retailers, logistics companies and the Department of Defense. I think it was a pretty representative cross-section of the EPCglobal community.”
Hutchinson, who is also director of industry adoption for EPCglobal US, located in Lawrenceville, N.J., says, “In terms of meeting our objectives, it was a really great event because it let us do apple-to-apple comparisons and expose end users to what is possible [in using the different frequency tags to track items].”
The next step for the item-level tagging requirements group is to work with EPCglobal’s air-interface working group to collate and analyze the results of the 56 demonstrations that took place during the event. These demonstrations were comprised of seven use-case scenarios involving the identification or commissioning of tags at the item level (see EPCglobal Focuses on Item-Level Tagging). The items included apparel, DVDs and drug containers. The use cases included reading tags attached to the items as they were moved through dock-door readers or past a point-of-purchase terminal, or while stationary on a shelf or hanger. One test also included reading a collection of tagged goods with tags oriented randomly in regard to the interrogator’s antenna—such as a quantity of drug vials in a plastic tote. Some of the technology vendors provided demonstrations of the use-case scenarios with both HF and UHF tags and readers. Hutchinson says that in the second week of April, EPCglobal expects to disclose the results and provide a roadmap for how the company will proceed based on those test results.
“These recommendations could take the form of new guidelines for using existing air-interface protocols, or they could be to develop a new air-interface protocol,” says Hutchinson. Until the analysis of the results is complete, however, she says she cannot provide any direct feedback on the demonstrations, or on the performance of tags in particular frequencies. “We like to be as data-driven as possible,” she explains.
The Item-Level Tagging Joint Requirements Group is made up of 10 members of EPCglobal’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Business Action Group, 10 from the Fast-Moving Consumer Goods Business Action Group and 10 from the Hardware Action Group, which turns user requirements into specifications for standards. The committee was set up because some end users had concerns about the performance of tags on items, and about such issues as security and privacy.
While manufacturers of LF tags participated in some of the tagging scenarios, the focus of the event was on HF and UHF tags, which are being most widely tested and deployed in item-level tracking. Whether HF or UHF is best suited for item-level tagging is a source of significant debate within the RFID industry (see The Great RFID Debate: HF or UHF?). Proponents of HF say the technology’s resistance to interference and stronger ability to read in the near field, rather than at distance, make it best suited for item-level applications. Proponents of UHF technology, meanwhile, claim UHF tags—particularly those compliant with the EPC Gen 2 standard—are also suitable for item-level tagging.
RFID Journal hosted a webinar today, Mar. 29, entitled “Item-Level Tagging Using UHF Gen 2,“ in which Impinj, a Seattle-based manufacturer of UHF chips and readers, explained why it considers UHF the best choice for item-level tagging.
“The technology won’t be the challenge,” says Hutchinson. “The challenge will be finding what best meets end users’ business challenges that are unique to their companies. Wal-Mart Stores, Target and the DOD are all going to receive a broad spectrum of goods from different companies in different industries, and they have to be able to receive those goods without amassing a lot of different infrastructures. And pharmaceutical firms also have to balance those needs with the need to get near-perfect performance, but I think this is a tractable problem.”
Users of EPC systems are not bound by one single frequency. In fact, drugmakers Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline (see Pfizer Using RFID to Fight Fake Viagra and GlaxoSmithKline Tests RFID on HIV Drug) are both testing HF tags for item-level tracking of pharmaceuticals, while applying UHF tags on cases and pallets of goods. Purdue Pharma, on the other hand, is applying UHF tags to bottles, cases and pallets of its OxyContin painkiller (see Purdue Pharma to Run Pedigree Pilot).
However, if product makers and distributors use both HF and UHF tags, businesses that receive the tagged goods, such as pharmacies or other retailers, will have to deploy equipment able to operate at both frequencies. Boston-based ThingMagic and a handful of other reader makers sell multifrequency readers capable of reading both HF and UHF tags.
“We don’t have a strong position on HF versus UHF,” says Kevin Ashton, ThingMagic’s vice president of marketing. “Our only position is that we need to offer whatever makes the most sense for the end user, and we don’t know yet which frequency that will be. The jury is still out, and I think it will be out for the rest of the year. You could argue that using multiple frequencies is preferable, because you spread out use of the RF spectrum—but using a single frequency would provide better economies of scale and might be better and healthier for the industry.”
According to Ashton, ThingMagic readers were used in a number of the demonstrations during last week’s event. He notes that addressing end users’ needs around item-level tagging will require more than just determining the best frequency. “For item-level tagging,” he says, “end users need a Gen 3 protocol that is more secure and offers more efficient read rates than the UHF Gen 2 standard.”