From the Editor's Desk

Welcome to the latest issue of the High Tech AIDCourier.

Is your company keeping up with the rapid changes in international standards that relate to RFID? Are you aware of how the Internet of Things will affect your business? High Tech Aid can provide detailed, customized reporting, monitoring and meeting attendance for your company needs. Email steve@hightechaid.com  for more information.

Another month has flown by and the news continues to pour in. My personal news involves me breaking my foot and having to wear a cast. That slowed me down a bit and my trip to the UK for standards meetings was physically challenging. Still, I am now back and working hard from my office.

Some of my time this month has been spent researching patents and looking for prior art to help a potential problem in the industry. According to Scan: The Data Capture Report last month, there is a new company – Round Rock Research, trying to assert patents in the RFID world. They have sent letters to users asking for payments as they hold patents that are key to the use of RFID in retail. I took a look at some of the patents they are trying to assert and was easily able to find prior art or explain why the claims are not solid for the current users of RFID.

This has raised some real questions in my mind as I see shades of the old Lemelson claims against our industry being repeated. The suppliers of RFID technology need to talk to their customers, and offer to help them to resolve any of these claims before the users start paying out large sums of money unnecessarily.

Don't forget that the AIM Expo is rapidly approaching. Come join the only AIDC Event that covers the full AIDC industry. There will conference sessions as well as a trade show. I will be running the Internet of Things conference on Monday September 26, 2011. The event is being held in Las Vegas and is being held in association with Pack Expo. For more details and sign up information visit: http://www.aim-expo.com.

If you are interested in RFID things you can follow my tweets at @RFIDMan.

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E-mail me at editor@hightechaid.com and tell us what you think. Don't forget to send this issue to your friends so that they can sign up for their own issue of the free newsletter at http://www.hightechaid.com. If you have news to share or info you need, let me know at news@hightechaid.com.

Technology News Briefs

RFID Standards

I have just returned from a week of RFID based standards meetings.

The meetings included SC 31/WG 7 where we discussed the implications of security and file management in RFID tags. The standardization will be accomplished by modifying the air interface standards (ISO/IEC 18000 series) and then creating a series of standards to describe a security method (suite) (ISO/IEC 29167-xx).

The other standards meetings were all sub-groups of SC 31/WG 4.

SG 1 is responsible for the data content of an RFID tag. The meeting started with Comment Resolutions Meetings (CRM) for ISO/IEC 15962 and ISO/IEC 15961-1. All the comments from the previous ballot were discussed and resolved and both documents were recommended for balloting at the FDIS level. The committee also agreed to create an adhoc to work on ISO/IEC 15961-4 and to create a Technical corrigendum for ISO/IEC 24753.

SG 3 is responsible for the RFID air interface standards. The committee spent most of its time on two issues. The first is the modification of the ISO/IEC 18000-6 air interface. This will be modified to allow the use of security suites by the air interface. The first of these suites is likely to be based on AES 128 and the air interface commands have to be augmented to allow the encryption technology to work. In the future we expect to see other suites added as well as other parts of ISO/IEC 18000. The rest of the meeting was spent reviewing a revision to the ISO/IEC 18000-7 standard. This revision adds a new extended mode to the standard allowing for even greater functionality. The new mode adds higher data rate, sensor interfaces, security, and other features to improve it.

Finally SG 6 is responsible for the conformance and performance RFID standards. Most of these standards are either published or in ballot. The committee created ad hoc groups to continue the work on revisions to ISO/IEC 18046-3 and ISO/IEC 18047-6.

To keep up to date on the work in the RFID standards world visit http://www.understandRFIDstandards.com. If you want more information on ISO standardization or on any issue of RFID standardization, then email steve@hightechaid.com.

Radio Frequency Identification