NEC lends weight to RFID standards effort

24 May 2004 10:25

The electronics giant has become the first Japanese firm to join EPCglobal, a European organisation pushing for standards that will tie in with a next-generation barcode system

Tokyo-based electronics giant NEC is backing a global effort to establish standards for radiofrequency identification technology.

The company last week became the first Japanese IT firm to join EPCglobal, a Belgium-based organisation seeking to develop RFID standards to work in tandem with a next-generation barcode system called electronic product code.

Membership in EPCGlobal will allow the company to participate in standardisation projects and trials. It will provide the firm with necessary information to develop RFID-based offerings for retailers in the United States and Japan, NEC said in statement.

These efforts will be expanded to other geographies in the later stages, NEC added.

This announcement comes as a further testament to the firm's support for RFID-based inventory tracking systems. In January this year, NEC established a 300-member strong team in Japan to develop radio tags and related hardware, software and integration tools.

Most recently, the company partnered with RFID equipment maker Tagsys to provide a technology and services bundle aimed at businesses in Southeast Asia.

NEC has already been involved in several RFID trials with Japanese authorities such as the Ministry of Public Management and Home Affairs. However, such experiments are often based on a local radio spectrum and use radio tags and readers which have not been ratified with the rest of the world. This is a roadblock which EPCglobal is hoping to resolve.

To date, the group has received three RFID standards proposals from companies like Royal Philips Electronics, Texas Instruments and US-based RFID specialist Alien Technology.

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