From the Editor's Desk

Welcome to the latest issue of the High Tech AIDCourier.

It has been a busy month here since last I wrote. I spent 10 days in Europe which included a week of standards work in Groenlo in the Netherlands. Details of the standards progress are given below.

I also spent time upgrading my laptop with a Solid State Drive and Windows 8. An interesting experience and one that has taken more time that I would have hoped.

Now the U.S. elections are over, we are hoping that business can get back to thinking about moving forward and we hope that we will all see an increase in the interest in our technologies.

Check out the book section this month for RFID-related books.

Follow my Twitter feed (@RFIDMan) for more current RFID, IOT and AIDC news and information.

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Technology News Briefs

RFID Standards

This month we held a series of ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 31 meetings in the Netherlands. There were meetings of WG 7, WG 4/SG 1 and WG 4/SG 3. The week started off in WG 7 talking about the security of RFID. There are currently eight different security suites approved for standardization with another two in ballot for approval and a further three or four likely to be submitted.

Why so many and what is the difference? Good question. The suites submitted so far range from simple XOR to AES 128 based security with everything in between (and above). The organizations that have suggested the inclusion of these suites all have very specific reasons for suggesting them and have applications lined up. They all have one thing in common, they have been designed to be used in an RFID chip, some for active chips, others for passive chips. The big question in my mind is whether they will all get implemented in silicon in an RFID chip – I doubt it.

Next we moved to a meeting of the air interface group – SG 3. This group has been the creators of all of the ISO/IEC 18000 series of standards. The new versions of the 18000-6 series are now either published or about to be (we are waiting for 18000-6 and -63 to be published). ISO/IEC 18000-4 has just been approved to have a new air interface added (mode 3, an active tag) and work is about to start on that. The group is waiting for GS1 EPCglobal to finish their final review of the EPC Gen 2 V 2 specification so that it can be brought into the ISO/IEC 18000-63 standard. We also formed a group to create a new work item proposal for 18000-3 to add security.

Finally the RFID data group (SG 1) met. This group deals with the data aspects of an RFID tag, and their work is critical to the proper use of an RFID tag.

If you want more information on ISO standardization or on any issue of RFID standardization, then email steve@hightechaid.com. For a look at RFID standards work, you can visit http://www.UnderstandRFIDstandards.com.

Radio Frequency Identification