Forward-looking: While passive RFID-based systems do actually exist, reliably transmitting data within industrial environments can still be problematic. A newly approved standard aims to solve the issue by exploiting the fundamental inner workings of radio and wireless technologies.
Four Japanese organizations have developed a new technology for managing RFID wireless communications without resorting to additional power sources. The ISO/IEC 18000-65 standard, which is based on the previously approved ISO/IEC 18000-63 standard, establishes a solution for item management and identification through radio frequency.
The new standard, which was finalized in February, describes both physical and logical interfaces that make wireless RFID tags provide their data to external sensors. This "passive-backscatter Interrogator-Talks-First (ITF) system" exploits the fact that passive tags can come "back to life" when they are hit by radio waves.
The ITF system allocates a dedicated sub-channel to each RFID tag in the 860 MHz to 930 MHz frequency range. This way, every tag can connect and stream a continuous flow of data. Furthermore, a logical interface provides a digital sensor with the ability to reliably transmit the RFID data to an "interrogator" – an external reader. Passive RFID tags can work in extremely low-power conditions, requiring approximately 10 µW to power up.
Panasonic states that the ISO/IEC 18000-65 standard is designed to develop advanced Internet of Things ambient systems. Battery-free sensor systems based on RFID technology are already in use, but they lack the ability to constantly acquire diverse types of environmental data such as vibration, strain, or temperature changes. So far, no international standard existed for regulating backscatter communication on individual frequency channels in sensor-rich environments.
Thanks to the new ISO-approved technology, different off-the-shelf sensors and wireless devices can now be quickly integrated into battery-free wireless communication solutions. The international standard should improve interoperability in industrial and custom applications, with Panasonic suggesting potentially massive changes in infrastructure inspection and maintenance, inventory management, and more.
The ISO/IEC 18000-65 technology was developed by a team at Keio University, together with Japanese corporations Denso Wave, Ramxeed, and Panasonic. The quartet has been working on the new standard since 2023, thanks to competitive research funding granted by Tokyo authorities and Keio professor Jin Mitsugi acting as project leader. The consortium now plans to show what the technology can actually do with several proof-of-concept demonstrations in Japan.