Five Environments Where IPICO Outperforms Conventional RFID

IPICO IP	Meeting the Challenges of Application Environments
	Motion	Distance	Crowding	Materials	Spectrum
IP-X Protocol:
Tag Talks First/Only	Yes		Yes		Yes
Non-modulating readers			Yes		Yes
Dual Frequency: Tags and Readers		Yes		Yes

 When technology moves out of the lab and into the world, it is really put to the test. There are five environmental dimensions where IPICO offers decisive structural performance advantages over alternative technologies.

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Motion

Two challenges for conventional RFID are reading fast-moving objects and dynamic tag populations.

• Objects moving at speeds of more than 80 KPH – autos or trains, for example – are difficult for conventional passive UHF solutions to track.  Our IP-X^TM technology is capable of tracking objects moving at speeds of up to 250 KPH.
• Objects moving in random patterns – people milling about an airport, for example – are not easily and not always picked up by conventional RFID. IPICO IP-X is optimized for dynamic tag populations with late arrivals and early departures within an RFID beam.

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Distance 

• In controlled environments, the read-range for conventional passive RFID may be extensive. However, in combination with other factors such as speed, type of material, reader crowding and available bandwidth, effective read-ranges can drop well below workable levels  – for example, in free flow people tracking, highway tolling and food distribution.
  
  IPICO UHF tags and readers offer effective solutions in long read-range scenarios where distance is combined with speed.
  
  Where distance is combined with tagged items that contain liquids, IPICO Dual Frequency tags and readers offer effective solutions.

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Crowding

Crowded environments pose three special problems for conventional RFID:

• Reader Interference: When the signal from one reader collides with the signal of another. This can happen in a packed warehouse where many readers are required for coverage or in airports where mobile readers travel into the read range of other readers.
  
  Conventional technologies are limited to approximately 50 readers per 1 km2 per site in the USA and 10 readers per 1 km2 per site in Europe. However, with IPICO there is no limit of the number of readers because all readers can share the same frequency band.

• Tag Crowding: In dense tag environments, too many tags can overwhelm a reader's ability to process data. The IP-X protocol can handle flows of tags at rates of up to 200 tags per second on a continuous basis. Conventional alternatives can handle high tag rates only in short bursts.

• Tag Masking: When tags overlap, one tag can hide in the shadow of another. This can easily occur in applications for crowd monitoring or reading racks of garments. IPICO's small, low-power chips operate on the minimalist IP-X TagTalkFirst^TM protocol allowing IP-X-based chips to be reliably picked up in weak and fluctuating fields where conventional RFID technology fails.
  
  The failure of conventional technology is due to the complexity of their protocols. The alternative protocols require multi-state communications for successful identification of tags.

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Materials

Some materials absorb or reflect the radio waves used for RFID communications, posing challenges for a variety of applications.

• For example, people, animals, foods and beverages are largely made up of water. Water is a lossy material that absorbs UHF radio waves making it difficult or impossible for UHF RFID to operate, except in restricted circumstances.
  
  IPICO's Dual Frequency reader is able to read through water, foil and other materials, making it ideal for a wide variety of asset tracking and supply chain management applications.  

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Spectrum

Global RF applications must operate in a variety of regulatory environments, creating complex spectrum management issues.

In Europe, Asia and other jurisdictions, most of the UHF bandwidth has been allocated to wireless communications, leaving little room for RFID. Restricted bandwidth availability inhibits the performance of conventional UHF RFID because conventional UHF RFID requires a different frequency band for each reader.

IPICO avoids spectrum issues. Our IP-X non-modulating readers can share the same frequency band, enabling IPICO technology to operate at full potential in most countries with as little as 200 kHz to 2 MHz bandwidth.

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Summary

IPICO technology addresses all five dimensions of challenging application environments. For more information, please contact us.

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