TI teams up for EPC Gen 2 Interoperability

Texas Instruments Incorporated today announced broad industry support for its Electronic Product Code (EPC) Gen 2 technology through its collaboration with 12 leading printer and reader manufacturers: Avery Dennison, AWID, Datamax Corporation, FEIG, Paxar, Printronix, SATO, Sirit Inc., SAMSys, ThingMagic, WJ Communications, and Zebra Technologies Corporation.  TI is working with this alliance to ensure interoperability within the EPC Gen 2 radio frequency identification (RFID) infrastructure and drive accelerated adoption of EPC Generation 2 compliant solutions in the global retail supply chain.  All of the companies are committed to providing products based on the EPC Gen 2 standard, and are working in close collaboration with TI to bring to market a wide range of interoperable solutions for encoders, readers, printers, and hardware devices that support TI's EPC Gen 2 products which are planned for volume production beginning in 3Q 2005.
"TI is proud to continue its collaboration with leading global manufacturers of hardware devices with a common goal of delivering interoperable, reliable and scalable solutions to achieve the promise of the Generation 2 standard for mass adoption in the retail supply chain," said Tony Sabetti, UHF/Retail Supply Chain director, Texas Instruments RFid Systems.
"The UHF Gen 2 protocol is one of the most significant developments for RFID in the value chain.  For multi-national companies such as Kimberly-Clark it will allow us to deploy a common technology platform across all of our businesses.  Even if your business is more local in nature, you will realize the benefits from improved performance interoperability, and scalability.  K-C is encouraged and pleased with the efforts of Texas Instruments and collaboration of others as they work together to deliver solutions to help drive RFID adoption," said Michael O'Shea, director of Corporate Auto-ID/RFID Strategies and Technology, Kimberly-Clark Corporation.
The EPC Gen 2 standard is widely supported by users and manufacturers within the RFID industry and will facilitate the widespread deployment of EPC RFID technology in the retail supply chain.  In 2004, TI and other major RFID suppliers worked to define this next generation standard which was ratified by EPCglobal in December.  EPC Gen 2 has several advantages over the first-generation EPC Class 0 and Class 1 standards including global interoperability, the ability to optimize performance in different global regulatory environments, read/write field programmability, faster tag read/write rates, the ability to operate in dense reader environments, and migration to future EPC classes.