EPCglobal’s UHF Generation 2 air interface for RFID incorporated by ISO/IEC

Published 21 July 2006

RFID technology is becoming more and more important in retail’s supply-chain operations and in homeland security-related cargo tracking missions; one more step is taken toward global standardization of the technology

EPCglobal, the nonprofit standards organization driving global adoption of the Electronic Product Code (EPC), said that its UHF Generation 2 air interface protocol has been incorporated into the ISO/IEC 18000-6 Amendment 1 as Type C on UHF RFID by the International Standards Organization (ISO). The amended standard was recently approved by ISO and published for distribution.

Incorporation in the ISO standard comes just eighteen months after it was ratified as a hardware standard by EPCglobal in December 2004. EPCglobal has certified more than a dozen RFID readers, tags, and integrated circuits as Gen2-compliant; they are commercially available today. The protocol was submitted to ISO last year for consideration as an ISO global standard.

The EPCglobal Gen2 standard was initially developed by more than sixty of the world’s leading technology companies and describes the core capabilities required to meet the performance needs end-users typically want. EPCglobal Gen2 is a foundational element for creating standard interfaces and protocols to drive the development of new RFID hardware products to provide accurate, cost-efficient visibility of information throughout supply chains.