Чип для меток ICODE UID-OTP

Компания NXP Semiconductors (в прежней жизни Philips Semiconductors) начала поставки образцов чипов для HF RFID меток нового поколения EPC. Чип реализует многие особенности протокола, которые еще не утверждены, но предполагаются в новом стандарте EPC для частоты 13.56 МГц. Цитируем пресс релиз от NXP:

The UID-OTP chip supports higher read rates than current HF chips: up to 200 inlays carrying the chip can be read at once, he says, whereas no more than 100 HF tags can usually be simultaneously read. The UID-OTP also supports a password feature, which, when deployed, makes the tag data inaccessible to unauthorized readers. Unlike UHF Gen 2 chips, however, the data can only be written to the UID-OTP chip once. And as the EPC is being written to the chip's memory, it is simultaneously locked so it cannot be later altered.

The UID-OTP differs from the candidate EPCglobal HF specification, however, in two important ways. It does not have enough memory to support a 128-bit EPC, so a 96-bit EPC must be used. And tag singulation schemes written into the EPCglobal specification, says Gonsalves, allow significant read-rate improvements over what the UID-OTP supports.

But because both the UID-OTP and candidate EPCglobal HF standard specification are backward-compatible to the ISO-15693 standard, end users who have deployed a reader architecture on the 15693 (or legacy ICODE protocols) will be able to upgrade the readers to read either UID-OTP tags or the EPCglobal HF standard tag (when it emerges) through a firmware upgrade.

Jordon also notes that EPCglobal has developed the reader command set for the candidate HF standard in harmony with the current reader command set for Gen 2 UHF tags; NXP has done the same for UID-OPT tags. Thus, it will be simpler and less costly for Tagsys and other RFID vendors to create multi-frequency readers able to encode and read both the HF and UHF tags.

NXP is making the ICODE UID-OTP chips available to tagmakers today. Sample pricing starts at around 6 cents apiece, depending on volume.