This article was originally published by RFID Update.
June 17, 2005—Royal Philips Electronics of the Netherlands and Dallas-based Texas Instruments issued a joint press release yesterday announcing their efforts to test that GEN 2 products conform to the new specification. According to the release, the collaboration “is aimed at ensuring interoperability and accelerating market deployment of Gen 2 products, such as labels, hardware and system solutions, to offer multiple sourcing for implementations of RFID throughout the world.” The GEN 2 standard, ratified by EPCglobal last December, is considered a critical element in the furtherance of RFID’s adoption in the supply chain. Vendors of RFID supply chain-focused software and hardware have been working since December to ready GEN 2-compliant products, and it is widely expected that in the third and fourth quarters of this year, the industry will see a flurry of product releases and upgrades touting new GEN 2 capabilities.
TI and Philips will be closely watched. They had long been expected to aggressively enter the market for RFID chips in the year following GEN 2 ratification, and now that time is nearing. While there are certainly other players in the RFID chip space, the size and available resources of these two heavyweights suggests that their contribution to the market will be, initially, very substantial. At the very least, this is how the companies themselves are framing it. Michael Cernusca, Philips’ manager of the RFID Product Management Team, stated, “Ensuring interoperability between the major IC players will help to bring the EPC Gen 2 standard into the marketplace as early as possible, allowing the global business community to benefit from deploying RFID across multinational infrastructures.”
The press release made a point to champion the success of EPCglobal’s standard developments effort, quoting TI’s director of technology development Bill Santini as saying, “Typically, an international standard — from work plan to final ratification — is a lengthy process spanning several years. In 2004, TI, Philips and other major RFID suppliers worked to define the Gen 2 standard which was successfully ratified by EPCglobal Inc. in December, a milestone accomplishment in less than 18 months.” Hopefully, the combined GEN 2-testing efforts of these two competitors will continue in that vein and bring about faster development of GEN 2 product.
Read the press release at Philips