Alien Technology released the latest integrated chip Higgs-9. According to the company, Higgs-9 offers the highest storage capacity, higher sensitivity and lower cost among its chips. 

This chip is the company's ninth chip since its establishment in 1994, and it replaces Higgs-3, the previous highest memory chip.

Alien is currently integrating Higgs-9 chips into its own inlays, and partner inlay manufacturers such as American company Vizinex RFID are also using new chips in their released products.

Alien vice president of global sales Michael Hetrick said that Higgs-9 provides the highest available memory for EPC UHF RFID tags. Compared with previous high-memory chips, its sensitivity is higher and the price is lower.

Higgs-9 uses Alien's Higgs Sentinel memory platform, providing 96-bit EPC memory and 688-bit user memory. Some of the user memory can be transferred to the EPC memory, so that the EPC data can be expanded to a maximum of 496 bits. According to the company, among its chips, Higgs-9 can provide the highest storage capacity, with higher sensitivity and lower cost.

In addition to the memory improvement, the new chip also improves the read sensitivity of 3 decibels and the write sensitivity of 6 decibels. The improved performance of the chip means that depending on the environment, the tag can have a 10% to 20% greater reading distance than the previous chip.

According to the company's report, write sensitivity has also been similarly improved. This means that tags can be encoded faster over longer transmission distances. In addition, Higgs-9 also supports scenes such as fast printing and encoding applications.

The chip memory has four data blocks, and each data block can contain a unique password. Therefore, the chip can allow a tag to provide different companies or individuals with access to individual data blocks.

In this way, this tag has practical value in application scenarios such as complex supply chain, charging or access control, and in these application fields, a separate data block facilitates the query of each component of the tag.

Hetrick said that there are two methods for RFID data management, one of which focuses on data storage in the cloud, that is, the EPC number stored on the tag will be linked to the data on the cloud server. Alien made low-memory chips and inlays for this purpose.

However, for those who cannot easily access the cloud server or want to provide data to other companies through simple tag reading, it is a better choice to write the information directly into the tag for the authorized party to access. This is RFID data processing. The second method.

For companies that need additional memory, the Higgs-3 chip released by Alien 12 years ago is a very popular product, but some users have been asking for additional memory to accommodate longer EPC numbers and more User memory space.

Terrel Pruett, vice president of Alien's global reader marketing and sales department, said that with this in mind, Higgs-9 is a new product, not just an updated version of Higgs-3.

For the automotive industry, Higgs-9 can be used by automakers to store data related to parts sold to customers. These data contain information about the parts themselves, such as manufacturing date and location, etc., which can then be accessed by automakers.

With this chip, companies can add other data such as vehicle identification numbers with their own passwords, and dealers can also query labels for repair, maintenance and recall management. In this way, users can view or write related data only through a separate data block, without having to access the server.

 In addition, Higgs-9 can also be used in the field of toll collection or access control, providing information about the vehicle and its driver attached to the tag, such as the registration number, driver's license number, and the address of the gated community. The chip can also be used in other markets that require data management, such as an RFID tag project that requires multi-party supervision, including electrical appliance manufacturers that provide customers with warranty and pharmaceutical companies with complex supply chains.

 Pruett said that several companies are currently trialling the new chip. According to the feedback from these companies, they all approve of the chip. Based on the increase in demand, Alien chose to develop a new type of high memory chip with higher sensitivity, Pruett added, “We are now focusing on the product development cycle, and this is the first of several new products.” The company Will also provide low-memory Higgs series chips.

Hetrick believes that the use of RFID is growing around the company’s desire to "have large amounts of data without human intervention." Passive RFID has proven to be the cheapest way to collect information without human intervention. As data analysis becomes more and more important, RFID will become more and more valuable."

At the same time, Hetrick pointed out that although Higgs-9 is cheaper than Higgs-3, it may not have a significant impact on the cost of inlay, because the chip only accounts for 5% to 7% of the total cost of the label. As "Higgs-3 has a large customer base and is running very well", the company does not intend to stop producing Higgs-3 in the future.

Alien is now embedding the chip in the ALN-9954 "G" label for windshields on cars; embedded in the ALN-9940 Squiggle label for general asset tracking; embedded in the small version of Squiggle ALN-9962 Short tags are used for government-issued ID cards and passports, as well as any other standard use cases that require narrower tags.