Overview Of EPCglobal Class 1 Generation 2 And Comparison With 1st Generation EPCglobal Standards By Daniel M. Dobkin, Enigmatics And Daniel J. Kurtz, WJ Communications

EPCglobal was formed in 2003 to take the activities of the Auto-ID Center forward into a non-profit standards framework supporting use of RFID in the supply chain and in other applications. As part of this mission, EPCglobal sought to create a single worldwide standard for the UHF RFID reader-tag air interface. This second-generation standard ("Gen 2") was developed in 2004 and became publicly available in 2005; it has also been submitted to the International Standards Organization (ISO) with the intention that it should become part of the ISO-18000 series of RFID standards, as ISO18000-6C. Earlier EPCglobal protocols, the Class 0 Generation 1 ("Class 0") and Class 1 Generation 1 ("Class 1") standards, have seen wide commercial deployment and may be familiar to the reader.

Numerous vendors have announced upgrades for existing RFID readers, and new reader models, to support Gen 2 tags, and by the end of 2005 several tag manufacturers were able to supply Gen 2 tags in quantity. In this series of short articles, we will try to provide an introduction to those parts of the standard that directly affect users, to help them understand what the terminology means and make optimal use of the new capabilities provided by Gen 2 tags and readers. We will also compare each aspect of the standard to the Class 0 and Class 1 standards to clarify distinctions and their significance.