How Do RFID Interrogators Read Information (Such as “Hello, World”) Written to Tags?

Is that data sent in the form of packets or inside the Electronic Product Code (EPC)?

—Simon

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Simon,

With a passive UHF RFID tag based on the Electronic Product Code standards, no information is stored within the EPC. The EPC is a separate memory area in the chip that holds only the EPC and nothing else. Some chips have only this memory area and nothing more, though most also contain user memory, which is divided into several blocks.

Users can send commands to a reader to write information into user memory blocks. You might write the words "Hello, world" into memory block 1 and then write "Store 1234" into memory block two, for example. When the tag is interrogated, the reader captures this information. Software could be set up to display the data to workers on a screen, so that they would know they should deliver the item to store 1234.

I hope this answers your question, and I look forward to seeing you at RFID Journal LIVE! in May.

—Mark Roberti, Founder and Editor, RFID Journal