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New RFID Chip Promises Major Performance Gains
Thursday March 27th, 2008) k# B$ i/ z* V- i0 o; y* T% l
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RFID chip and reader manufacturer Impinj today announced version 3 of Monza, the RFID chip that powers the majority of Gen2 tags deployed in the market today. RFID Update spoke with Dimitri Desmons, Impinj's vice president of RFID marketing, about the new product and its enhanced performance.
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"Most importantly," said Desmons, "Monza 3 offers a very significant increase in performance." There are a number of chip characteristics that affect a tag's overall performance, and Desmons explained that three of them -- read sensitivity, write sensitivity, and interference rejection -- are markedly improved with Monza 3.
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$ B0 f( G! Z6 y( |+ nRead sensitivity in theory determines how far away a tag can be read; that is, read range. The higher the read sensitivity, the longer the range. In practice, it affects read reliability, or the ability of a tag to be read. High read sensitivity can boost performance around RF-unfriendly materials like liquid and metal, for example. It also enables greater flexibility in the placement of a tag. Impinj claims that Monza 3 exhibits up to a 40 percent improvement in read sensitivity.
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/ E: `& v0 A' e: f% o3 b0 SWrite sensitivity addresses how reliably tags can be encoded with data. Tag encoding is a slower process than reading, and has proven a bottleneck for many high-speed RFID systems. (One can imagine the challenge of accurately encoding tagged pill bottles traveling down a production line at hundreds of feet per second.) Impinj pegs the improvement to Monza's write sensitivity at 100 percent, or twice as sensitive as before.
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When combined with so-called "mass serialization," high write sensitivity can enable large quantities of goods within a case or multiple cases to be encoded at once, in bulk. Mass serialization is a method of tag encoding that Impinj has been advocating since late last year, when it introduced a solution for the pharmaceutical industry that offered an alternative to the more challenging "inline encoding" described above. Rather than encode tagged bottles individually as they travel at high speeds down a conveyor belt, as with inline encoding, mass serialization calls for goods to first be aggregated into a case or cases at the end of the line, then encoded all at once there. (See Impinj Demos New Approach for Pharma RFID Tagging for more on mass serialization.) |
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