Philips Electronics and Texas Instruments are joining forces to drive the adoption of the worldwide RFID standard known as EPC Generation 2 standard.
The collaboration on conformance testing for ensuring interoperability is intended to accelerate deployment of RFID labels, hardware and systems, according to the companies. The royalty-free EPC Gen 2 standard, which is an RFID specification for UHF band centred around 900 MHz, is currently in the process of ISO standardisation.
The new class of RFID devices is widely seen as important for developing wider deployment of the access control, logistics and ticketing technology.
EPC Gen 2 extends the first-generation EPC standards by being more truly optimised for different global regulatory environments, according to the standard's proponents.
It also includes read/write field programmability, faster tag read/write rates, operation in dense reader environments and migration to future EPC classes.