RFID Alliance Lab Reports

RFID Alliance Lab Performance Reports

The RFID Alliance Lab has completed its first two performance reports, and the third report is currently being written.

What's in the Report

The first report produced by the RFID Alliance Lab covered 10 commercially available UHF RFID tags based on Class 0 and Class 1 Electronic Product Code (EPC) specifications. Phase 1 testing was completed in October 2004, and the first report was published in December 2004 and is available for purchase. This report analyzes:

Read range: the distance at which tags can be read.
Orientation: how well tags can be read at different angles.
Tags near metal and water: how well tags can be read when placed at various distances from water and a steel plate.
Product-conveyor performance: how well tags can be read when placed on products on a conveyor in an operational distribution center.

More information about how the tests were conducted is available.

Extended excerpts from the first report are available here.

The second RFID Lab performance report, UHF EPC Tag Performance Evaluation, covered the performance of 9 commercially available RFID tags based on Class 1 and Class 0 EPC specifications. This report was published in May 2005 and is available for purchase. It includes analyses of the following:

How quickly tags can be read individually and in populations
Statistical variation between tags
Write performance
Effectiveness of the "kill" command
Performance of pharma tags

Where to Get the Reports

An electronic copy of the reports A Performance Analysis of Commercially Available UHF RFID Tags Based on EPCglobal's Class 0 and Class 1 Specifications and UHF EPC Tag Performance Evaluation is available from the RFID Journal website by clicking here.

What's Next

The third performance report, due out in the summer of 2006, will focus on reader performance, including

Read distance vs. various Generation 1 and Generation 2 tags
Read speeds of Generation 1 and Generation 2 tags
Features, options, and expert analysis of readers