RFID
Standard
In order for
most new technologies to gain a foothold in an application market,
there has to be a wide spread acceptance of that technology equally
by all participants involved. This is accomplished today through
accepted standards established by known organizations such as ANSI
(American National Standard Institute) and ISO (International
Organization for Standardization).
This was true
for the present ADC technologies in use today, and is also proving
to be the case for RFID technologies that have been released into
the marketplace. RFID Standard also provides several market
benefits. Some of these are listed
below:
- Increases
customer confidence in new technologies.
- Promotes
worldwide RFID acceptance and technology
advancement.
- Broadens
markets for manufacturers, encourages global competition, and
reduces prices for end users.
- Facilitates
applications development by encouraging interoperability and by
reducing customization.
- Provides
developmental platforms for complementary products (software,
translators, and hardware peripherals /
accessories).
- National and
ISO standards often influence local regulatory efforts that govern
operations, implementations, and coexistence of the new technology
or existing complimentary technologies as
well.
Before a
manufacturer of a new technology can participate in the exercise of
establishing a RFID Standard for that technology, it is useful for
them to first associate that new technology to a market, and
application for it. There is some existing established RFID Standard
smart card application use. However, up until recently there was no
accepted draft standard for the application use of RFID for item
management applications.
To define the
RFID Standard for item management an ANSI committee (known as the
ANSI T6 committee) was created. This committee is assembled from
representatives of the various RFID manufacturers. Each of these
committee members made contributions to a summary of considerations,
and processes necessary for the creation of an RFID Standard item
management use standard. These lead to an outline for what would
become a draft (ANS 256) for the RFID item management use standard.
All of this
standards work began in 1992 when the first ANSI T6 meeting was
held. Let’s now fast forward to 1999 to see what has been
accomplished with this efforts.1/99: The ANS 256 draft standard was
approved by the ANSI T6 subcommittee and adopted by the U.S. Tag to
ISO SC31 as the official U.S. position on RFID for
item management.
2/99: The RFID
Standard was formally submitted to ISO by the U.S., and remains the
only completed national standard for
RFID.
8/99: The
2.45GHz protocols within the ANS 256 standard were approved as the
first international working draft standard for item management by
the ISO SC31 AIDC standards subcommittee for RFID
(WG4/SG3).
9/99: ANS NCITS
256-1999 – the American standard for RFID item management is
approved and published by the ANSI/NCITS board (scheduled for
9/24/99).Intermec’s Intellitag® 500 RFID technology and API
(application program interface) is included within the American
National Standard. This ANSI T6 developed API standard is approved
for use by ALL current and future ANSI-compliant RFID products for
item management at every frequency. The importance of this is that
it allows customers to develop RFID software solutions
NOW
RFID Standard
adds new flexibility: After years of consideration, the American
National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the National Committee for
Information Technology Standards (NCITS) have approved a standard
for radio frequency identification (RFID) item management systems
operating at 2.45 GHz. The RFID Standard was developed to encourage
widespread use of RFID technology which has been plagued by
proprietary systems that are generally undesirable, especially in
integrated supply chains.
Used in
conjunction with bar codes, RFID allows a user to follow a specific
unit of inventory through the supply chain, right down to a
container of product on a particular pallet as it passes through the
chain. A critical feature of the new RFID Standard is a common
application program interface (API). The API allows for
interoperability between RFID readers, the devices that read the
tags and communicate, and a host computer system. Despite the new
API, RFID users will still need to use readers from a common vendor
within a network or across a supply chain. That's because RFID tags
are still proprietary to individual vendors: one vendor's reader
won't read another vendor's RFID tags.
RFID technology
allows products to be identified at a distance, by means of a tag
that, when energized by radio waves, responds with identification
information. You've probably already seen RFID in another
application. It's the same basic technology used in proximity access
control cards, which unlock a door when waved in the general area of
a card reader. RFID tags in supply chain applications are similar
except that the RF signal is stronger, allowing goods to be
identified at a greater distance. The RFID Standard being adopted by
DoD is the same as that being adopted by Walmart, so there will be
only one standard for suppliers to comply with. The new standard is
called the Electronic Product Code (EPC), which is under development
by the Uniform Code Council (UCC) and EPCglobal, a new organization
under UCC.
