Impinj Technology to Solve Fundamental Problems for Explosive RFID Market
17 February, 2004
category: Contactless
Self-Adaptive Silicon Will Enable Significant Performance Enhancements
SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Feb. 17, 2004–Impinj, Inc., the Self-Adaptive Silicon(TM) company, today announced plans to provide Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) products which reduce inventory costs, improve out-of-stock conditions and minimize shrinkage for the trillion-dollar worldwide consumer packaged goods industry. Impinj’s RFID products will leverage the company’s award-winning Self-Adaptive Silicon technology to deliver low cost, long range, field rewritable functionality that complies with a single, open, worldwide RFID standard in accordance with recent initiatives by the world’s largest retailers.
Self-Adaptive Silicon, a proprietary integrated circuit design technology, enables standard logic CMOS to deliver extremely high performance circuits that consume very low power. This technology will improve the achievable performance for several key analog building blocks of RFID products, including rectifiers, oscillators, and modems. Self-Adaptive Silicon also underlies Impinj’s AEON(TM) nonvolatile memory (NVM), an embedded solution that enables true read/write capability without the added costs of a specialized semiconductor manufacturing process.
“We are excited to announce our entry into the explosive RFID market and see the great potential for Self-Adaptive Silicon to provide significant performance enhancements in RFID systems,” said Dr. William Colleran, Impinj’s president and CEO. “Our move into this market is a natural extension of our capabilities in high performance analog circuit design and nonvolatile memory,” he added.
Venture Development Corporation, a research firm specializing in the RFID market, projects tremendous demand for RFID products with a five-year compound annual growth rate of 22.6%, reaching $2.7B in dollar volume by 2007. “VDC contends Impinj is uniquely positioned to take advantage of the tremendous growth opportunities in the RFID market,” said Mike Liard, senior RFID analyst for Venture Development Corporation. “… Impinj’s strength in building memory for logic CMOS is a critical competitive advantage in the crowded IC market. VDC expects Impinj to be a key player to watch over the next two years,” he continued.
Impinj began work on RF Identification technologies in 2002, cooperating in the standard-setting work of the Auto-ID Center. Today, the company actively participates in EPCglobal Inc.’s standards development and has contributed heavily to the air interface and protocol for Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) standards. To ensure that its products address global RFID markets, Impinj also supports the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) process by participating in ISO’s US delegation.
Impinj’s RFID products will be introduced later this year. The company will make more announcements revealing industry partnerships and specific product plans in the coming months.