Impinj has become the second company this month to announce silicon supporting RFID tags using the second generation of EPCglobal's protocol.

On Friday, Philips announced its first engineering samples of an RFID chip compliant with EPCglobal's next-generation standard.

US firm Impinj said it has both readers and tags conforming to the standard, with tags sampling today and production due by the summer.

"Impinj's Monza chip is truly 100 per cent EPCglobal Gen 2 compliant and certifiable, unlike other offerings which are known colloquially in the industry as 'partial Gen 2' or 'G2 lite'," said Dr William Colleran, the firm's president and CEO.

The EPCglobal Generation 2 protocol works in the UHF band at 900MHz. Tag data rates are up to 640kbit/s.

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