Consortium forms in Japan for RFID tags

Tokyo - Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and about 100 Japanese companies will form a consortium and launch a two-year project to develop chips that cost as little as 5 cents for use in radio-frequency identification tags. The group will develop chips and systems that follow specifications set by the International Organization for Standardization, which is in the process of defining RFID standards.

A preparatory committee has already started work to establish the Hibiki (ring) Consortium by April. The IC tag project will involve a range of companies from the semiconductor, electronics, printing, publishing, apparel and distribution industries.

"The consortium will have two main targets. One is to promote Japan's proposals to be selected as the ISO standard, and another is to lower the cost of IC tags," said Kazuya Mimura, assistant director of the Information Economy Division at the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI).

In the United States, the use and standardization of the RFID-based electronic product code is being promoted by EPCglobal Inc.

Japan's proposals to the ISO cover the air interface that defines the frequencies used for RFID communications, as well as coding that defines each communicating item. Japan has proposed frequencies in the UHF band from 860 MHz to 960 MHz, which covers the frequencies used in the United States and in Europe, and those that are planned for use in Japan. Japanese suppliers to date haven't put much effort into RFID in the UHF band, and the goal of the Hibiki Consortium is to make up lost ground.

Because the UHF band is reserved for cellular phones, RFID tags in Japan currently use the 13.56-MHz and 2.45-GHz bands. But the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications, which controls radio wave usage, set aside this summer the 950- to 956-MHz frequencies in the UHF band for RFID tags.

Hibiki will therefore concentrate its efforts on chips for the tags, readers and writers that use the UHF band.

METI has appropriated about $6 million for the Hibiki project in the next fiscal year. Low-cost chips and tags are considered essential if the items are to proliferate, so METI has set a target of cutting the cost of RFID chips to one-tenth to one-hundredth the price tag of today's ICs. "The budget will be used to develop low-cost tag chips with a target of less than 5 yen [about 5 cents] within two years," said Mimura of METI.

In addition to low-cost chips, Hibiki will develop compact antennas that can be created with printing technologies.