Designed to be the future replacement of barcodes, EPCGlobal Gen2 is an UHF technology featuring an extensible unique ID (96 bits in the earliest implementations), writable tags, support for up to 64Kbit in-tag memory and a password protected "kill" command to permanently disable the tag.
Thanks to a very good adaptive anticollision algorithm, it support theroretical rate of up to 600 tags detected per second.
The standard is designed to be extensible, and manufacturers have implemented both tags with onboard sensors (e.g. the CAEN temperature logger tag) or with an onboard battery (e.g. PowerID Semipassive tag) to increase the range.
It is the technology of choice of Wal Mart and the US Department of Defence.
The numbering scheme is managed by EPCGlobal, which is handling anything from container level tracking to item level tracking for the global supply chains.
