1998-11-03 , ESC-9877
Business News From Philips Semiconductors

Texas Instruments and Philips Semiconductors announced today that they have reached an agreement to support a common protocol communications standard for Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) "smart labels".

Philips Semiconductors and Texas Instruments have submitted a common proposal to the International Standards Organisation (ISO) at a recent meeting in Berlin, Germany. The proposal received unanimous support from the technical task force and was subsequently approved by the working group and ISO sub-committee. This emerging standard provides the first multi-vendor platform for vicinity card and smart label technology, and allows products from both companies to communicate at the same time with suitable reader/writer units. Co-operation between Texas Instruments and Philips Semiconductors is expected to greatly accelerate the development of the RFID smart label market.

Speaking for Texas Instruments, Dick Dane, general manager of the RFID business unit said, "This agreement represents the catalyst that business and industry have been waiting for. A common protocol now guarantees complete interoperability of each of our products and is a huge step in the full-scale deployment of smart labels."

Christoph Kauer, product line manager for RFID for Philips Semiconductors, added, "Key industry players have applauded our move to combine the best of the existing proprietary solutions into a new compatible platform. We feel confident that the smart label market will dramatically expand as a result of the strengthened confidence in the two market leaders."

With industry estimates forecasting the smart label market to reach 1 billion pieces in 2003, smart labels are one of the largest growth areas in the entire automatic identification market. Smart labels will be used to identify packages for express parcel services; airline baggage; valuable goods in retail and to protect branded goods from product piracy.

Smart labels are RFID-based transponders that are small enough to be laminated between layers of paper or plastic to produce low-cost, consumable labels. This new technology contains read/write memory to store information related to the product, manufacturer, or logistics process. They can be simultaneously operated by read/write devices at a rate of more than 30 labels per second and, unlike barcodes, they do not require a direct line-of-sight between the reader and label.

Philips Semiconductors, a division of Royal Philips Electronics, headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, is the ninth largest semiconductor supplier in the world and the third largest supplier of discretes in the world. Philips Semiconductors is a world leader in automatic identification components, setting the pace with leading innovations like radio frequency identification and smart card ICs. Philips Semiconductors' innovations in digital audio, video, and mobile technology position the company as a leader in the consumer, multimedia and wireless communications markets. Sales offices are located in all major markets around the world and are supported by systems labs.

Texas Instruments Incorporated is a global semiconductor company and the world's leading designer and supplier of digital signal processing solutions, the engines driving the digitalisation of electronics. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, the company's products also include calculators, controls and sensors, metallurgical materials and digital light processing technologies. The company has manufacturing or sales operations in more than 25 countries. Texas Instruments entered the radio frequency identification (RFID) market in 1991 with the world-wide introduction of TIRIS (Texas Instruments Registration and Identification System). Fusing together core competencies in advanced semiconductors, microelectronic packaging and computer system design, TIRIS has become a standard-setting technology used in thousands of object tracking and data collection applications around the world.

Texas Instruments is traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TXN.

Philips Semiconductors smart label products are marketed under the brand name of "I·CODE"

Texas Instruments smart label products are marketed under the brand name of "Tag-it"