When major retailer Wal-Mart announced in January 2008 that its suppliers to Sam’s Club could face fines of $2 to $3 for each pallet received without a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag, officials at Seattle’s Impinj couldn’t have been more pleased.
In June, Impinj sold off its logic non-volatile memory intellectual property to Virage Logic Corp. for $5.2 million. The following month, Impinj bought an Intel subsidiary that makes the chips that are used in RFID readers. In the no-cash deal, Intel accepted an undisclosed amount of Impinj stock.
As Impinj’s CEO William T. Colleran describes the company’s commitment, “We decided to double-down on RFID.”
The deal represented a major break for Impinj since its founding in 2000 by Dr. Chris Diorio, a University of Washington associate professor and currently Impinj’s chairman and chief technology officer. As a graduate student at Caltech, Diorio had helped electronics pioneer Dr. Carver Mead develop advances in semiconductors that operate with minimal electricity.
The first markets that Impinj pursued involved low-power circuits for cellular base stations, which found quick adoption by companies like Lucent and Nortel. A meltdown in the telecom industry, however, soon spurred Impinj to explore other markets.
The emerging technology of “passive RFID” was an obvious next step for the company. Operating without the use of a battery, passive RFID chips communicate with readers to identify the products they’re attached to. Using no power sources of their own, the devices convey data wirelessly by reflecting radio waves sent from reader devices. But, unlike barcodes, RFID tags don’t require line-of-sight, or manual, operation.
The low-power efficiency of Impinj’s RFID chips, Colleran says, boosts their read range from about two feet to 20 feet, which meets the latest RFID requirements, known as “UHF Gen 2” standards. “Those standards are much more sophisticated” than previous requirements, Colleran explains. “A reader can process over 1,000 tags per second.”
Along with consumer retailers like Wal-Mart, RFID tags are now required by manufacturers like Airbus and government agencies such as the U.S. Department of Defense. According to industry analyst ABI Research, the RFID market is expected to generate $9.7 billion by 2013.
Impinj, which employs about 125 people and has accumulated more than $110 million in venture-capital investment, has long been considered a company that is likely to make a public stock offering. While Colleran acknowledges that the company’s recent moves make it “better positioned,” he shies away from the prospect in light of the current turbulence in the capital markets. “We don’t spend a lot of time on [the IPO],” he says.