iPico Holdings, the South African RFID company has developed a new passive UHF RFID system for applications where tag data needs to be read fast.



The system uses a transmission method called Tag Talks Only (TTO) in place of Reader Talks First (RTF) and Tag Talks First (TTF) methods. RTF - that is used by RFID systems based on the ISO 18000-6 standards or EPCglobal - has readers starting communication between a tag and reader in a set of sequences. The interrogator sends energy to the tags, but the tags stay dominant until the reader requests them to respond. The reader can identify a specfic tag and request data from it by using a complex sequence of commands to select a particular subset of tags, separating one tag from the subset using an anti-collision algorithm, and reading the required data it contains.