Texas Instruments and Moore Wallace Continue Alliance

DALLAS, Texas—Texas Instruments (TI) and Moore Wallace announced today a multi-year strategic agreement to offer Electronic Product Code™ (EPC) Generation (Gen) 2 smart label solutions. TI will be Moore Wallace's primary supplier of ultra-high frequency (UHF) EPC Gen 2 tag technology. Moore Wallace will provide EPC Gen 2 finished labels to consumer product companies (CPG), manufacturers, and pharmaceutical companies who are implementing RFID supply chain applications.

The newest and most advanced of the EPCglobal Inc.™ specifications for the UHF band in the 900 MHz range, EPC Gen 2 provides enhanced features and improved performance including global interoperability, superior tag throughput, multiple read/write capability, enhanced security, and the ability to operate in dense reader environments. Moore Wallace, which is among the largest label converters in North America, will support the manufacture of 500-plus million EPC labels annually in multiple facilities. Samples of the EPC Gen 2 labels from Moore Wallace with TI EPC Gen 2 inlays are available now, with full production planned for later in the third quarter of 2005.

"TI's ability to design and manufacture the highest quality RFID tags in large volumes that meet our demanding reliability and ease-of-integration requirements while optimizing our processes, makes them an ideal partner as we produce finished EPC Generation 2 labels for our customers," said Greg Santini, senior vice president of label operations at Moore Wallace.

"A strategic label converter customer over the last seven years, our collaboration with Moore Wallace has advanced the market for RFID smart labels in a diverse number of applications. With top CPG suppliers looking to implement EPC Gen 2 technology in their retail supply chains, Moore Wallace continues to make significant investments in RFID and we look forward to a fruitful alliance in serving these new customers," said Julie England, vice president of Texas Instruments and general manager for Texas Instruments RFID Systems.

The companies have been working together since 1998 and this agreement extends their seven-year RFID smart label collaboration to the UHF market. Since EPCglobal Inc. ratified the Gen 2 specification about seven months ago, TI and Moore Wallace have worked to establish proven processes for RFID label production. The result: they are now able to provide production-ready Gen 2 tag solutions, moving the market from prototyping to production.

"Texas Instruments and Moore Wallace are ready to deliver high-volume Gen 2 production-ready smart labels, a milestone in a relatively short period of time from Gen 2 specification ratification in January of this year," said Enu Waktola, EPC Retail Supply Chain marketing manager of Texas Instruments RFID Systems.

Both companies look to produce hundreds of millions of Gen 2 smart labels in the next 18 months.