Here at Impinj, we are excited to see Xerafy delivering the innovative Metal Skin inlay powered by Impinj® Monza® 4QT tag chips. We tested sample Metal Skin inlays in our lab recently and saw up to 5 meters of range in both free air and on aluminum metal sheets. This is very impressive.

For some time now we have seen two mutually exclusive sets of RFID tag types:

1. Tags that work well in metal-rich environments but can’t go through the standard label conversion processes due to their form factor (hard tags)
2. Tags that have form factors designed for standard label conversion processes but perform poorly in metal-rich environments Continue reading →

Tego and our friends at Xerafy have been working on the concept of Smart Assets – having the right information in the right place at the right time.  Well, the Xerafy Pico XL is certainly the right product at the right time.

I participate in creating the aerospace data standards for RFID as a member of the Spec2000 RFID on Parts working group.  In that role, I get a lot of questions on how the standard works and how to deploy it in a business process.  For the past year or so, the majority of questions I get have been on the Low-Mem tag format.  It’s a format specifically targeted at items that don’t have long lifetimes or are not repairable, and therefore don’t need to hold full maintenance histories.  In practice, there’s been a lot of confusion about this part of the standard.  It says right in the standard that a 1 kilobit tag should suffice as a Low-Mem tag, but people call me up looking for a way to get their data to fit.  After working through a few details I usually have to tell them, “If you want to be compliant with the standard, you need a bigger tag.”

To help clear up some of the confusion, I wrote a short article for RFID Journal, “Demystifying the ‘Low Memory’ of Aviation’s Low-Memory Tags” that was published a few weeks ago.  In the article I hit the highlights on why 1Kbit was not enough for most aerospace companies and also explained that Tego had developed a 2Kbit chip, the TegoChip 2000, specifically to address the problem.  That article created a lot of buzz and in the intervening weeks I’ve gotten even more questions.  The most popular question I get these days is “where can I buy tags that use the 2Kbit chip?”

Now Xerafy has released their Pico XL tag.  It’s the right product at just the right time.  Tagging programs following the Low-Mem tag guidelines are really heating up now. Savvy program managers are looking for tags they can use now that won’t have to be replaced when the standard or their data needs to change.  The Pico XL has it all.  The TegoChip 2000 inside has 2Kbits of user space plus the maximum allowable EPC memory space.  That memory, unlike typical tags, assures data integrity for 30 years, even at high temperatures – exactly what’s needed for aerospace applications.  Now, combined with Xerafy’s world-class packaging capability, we have a chip that is available in a form factor that is easy to apply, small enough to fit just about anywhere, yet still has great performance thanks to the efforts of their expert antenna designers.  I have some of the on my desk now and I have to say, these are beautiful tags.  What’s more, the Xerafy package easily handles all environmental concerns and it’s already AS5678 certified, so it can start going on flyable parts today.  It’s definitely a smart tag for Smart Assets.

Other industries are taking note.  I talk to people in industrial process industries, oil and gas companies and energy providers.  The transportation industries are looking too – railroads, trucking, containers – they all realize that the aerospace guys continue to develop sophisticated processes for MRO and they are ready to ride on those efforts.  The Xerafy Pico XL is getting a lot of attention in all these places.

I’m really excited about what Xerafy has done here. The Pico XL is the first tag to use our 2Kbit chip, and they've delivered an excellent product that solidly embodies what we and our customers had in mind.