TORONTO--SIRIT Inc., a leading provider of radio frequency identification (RFID) hardware technology, announced that it has filed three new patent applications related to RFID reader technology with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
SIRIT specializes in RFID reader and tag design, development and manufacturing. Its RFID readers incorporate low, high and ultra-high frequency products, which are the required spectrums in its principal markets. In addition to the design and manufacturing of RFID readers, SIRIT has significant understanding of the inner workings of RFID tags, including EPC tags that are becoming the standard in worldwide supply chain applications. This experience, resident within SIRIT's engineering team, is particularly important to creating RFID reader designs that push the edges of performance.
Many of the engineering challenges in RFID technology reside within the domain of the radio portion of an RFID reader. SIRIT's patent filings revolve around unique and innovative implementations of RFID radio concepts. Throughout its eleven year history SIRIT has developed a reputation for excellence in the field of RFID radio design.
SIRIT's three patent filings deal with this RFID radio section. An RFID radio differs from traditional radio design in the fact that both the radio transmitter (the "tag illuminator") as well as the radio receiver (which deals with the weak tag response signal) are active at the same time and virtually at the same frequency. This requires a very clean transmit signal in combination with a high receiver blocking point while maintaining receiver sensitivity, requirements that typically are difficult to combine.
Loek d'Hont, Chief Technology Officer, SIRIT Inc. stated, "These patent applications reflect unique innovations that SIRIT believes are essential to ensure that RFID readers can meet the performance standards demanded by its customers in the supply chain market. For the end-user, these innovations will result in greater reader sensitivity and consistency while maintaining abundant illumination power to the tag. Such increased sensitivity is imperative for an effective RFID system, since it will improve system performance in those cases where "real-life" situations are a challenge, such as obstructing objects in the RFID read zone or RF absorption from items on pallets in a supply chain application."
"In addition," Mr. d'Hont continued, "the patent filings are targeted at achieving more robust read performance for RFID objects that are in high-speed motion, as well as developing a more effective way of dealing with RF multi-path situations. All of this is important for RFID performance in supply chain applications."
The three patent applications specifically relate to a) the above mentioned performance improvements, b) a more intelligent method of receiver baseband processing, and c) allowing for aggressive design to cost objectives in RFID reader design while maintaining maximum read range performance, which is very important for RFID applications that are highly cost-sensitive, such as RFID printers or RFID mobile computers.
