Press Release, May 2008

Tag with Agility Technology Debuts in August

ITTC has licensed manufacturing rights to its new Agility technology, which enables passive radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to perform reliably and efficiently in difficult environments, to Kansas City-based Starport Technologies.

“The performance of the Orion Tag using Agility technology is outstanding. We have measured read ranges up to 30 feet on metal,” says Jeff Nedblake, principal and managing partner of Starport. Orion is expected to be commercially available by August.

Starport initially licensed ITTC RFID technology designed specifically to work on metal or objects containing liquid in rugged industrial environments in 2007. With the Agility technology, Starport gains a tag designed as a less expensive but less rugged alternative.

Agility technology achieves typical read ranges of more than three times that of other comparable tags on metal and outperforms them on cardboard and other RF-friendly materials as well.

“There is conventional wisdom in the industry that tag performance degrades when the tag is near metal, and that’s just the way it is; the laws of physics dictate it to be so,” says Daniel Deavours, principal investigator and ITTC research assistant professor. “Conventional wisdom is wrong: you can make tags so they work well in air and on metal. You can have your cake and eat it too.”

For more information on Agility technology, go to www.ittc.ku.edu/AGILITY.