The unwinding of a protocol [Supplement, Applications & Practice]

The ISO 18000 Part 6C UHF standard is becoming a widely accepted standard in RFID applications in supply chain management and is driving development of passive tags. The communication primitives of ISO 18000 Part 6C are significantly different and more complex than ISO 18000 Part 7. The complexity of the Part 6C standard makes the design of these tags extremely time consuming and challenging for reducing power consumption and silicon area. This article examines various features of the ISO Part 6C standard and compares it to the ISO Part 7 standard for active tags for the purpose of evaluating generic interrogator/tag protocol complexity. For a 0.16 mm ASIC implementation, the Query command from ISO 18000 Part 6C is more complex than 10 primitives of the simpler ISO 18000 Part 7 standard.