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ISO/IEC 15693

ISO/IEC 15693 refers to a standard, published in three parts by the International Organization for Standardization, for a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) system with the following characteristics:

• Vicinity operation, with tag (card) read ranges of 50 to 1,000 mm (2 inches to 3 feet), depending on the implementation (contrast proximity systems which require the tag or card to be much closer to the reader).
• Passive tags which do not require any built-in power source, power being instead scavenged from the radio frequency field generated by the reader (contrast active RFID systems in which tags include a battery or other power source).
• Operation at a nominal frequency of 13.56 MHz, i.e. within the 13.553 to 13.567 MHz industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) radio band which is available worldwide.
• Detection and identification of multiple tags within range of the reader at the same time. (Most, if not all, RFID systems have this theoretical capability. It works in some, but not all, circumstances.)
• A 64-bit unique identifier (UID) for each tag, of which 8 bits are fixed and a further 8 bits indicate the chip manufacturer, leaving 48 freely-assigned bits. As a result, 281,474,976,710,656 tags can be made by each manufacturer before available UIDs are exhausted. This either is or isn't a big number, depending on your viewpoint. If everybody on the planet consumed one tagged article per day, the tag UIDs from one manufacturer would be exhausted in 100 years.
• Optionally, depending on the implementation, the ability to write and read back up to 65,536 bits (8,192 bytes) of information in a tag. Information is organized in up to 256 blocks of up to 256 bits each and blocks may be locked, preventing further write operations.

Terminology

The terminology used in the ISO/IEC 15693 standard documents appears to reflect the original intended use of the technology, which was personal identity cards of the sort that a company might issue to its employees so that they can pass through otherwise locked doorways. Part 1 of the standard (in section 4.2) defines the size of the card as 85.60 × 53.98 mm (​3 ³⁄₈ in × ​2 ¹⁄₈ in) by referring to ID-1 in ISO/IEC 7810. It also defines the size and placement of slots through which a belt clip can pass and makes the rather obvious statement that punching the slot should not disrupt the operation of circuitry inside the card. However, use of ISO 15693 technology has spread to many other applications (for example, automation in lending libraries) and the terms used here will be those used in the industry at large.

"Vicinity Cards" or "Vicinity Integrated Circuit(s) Cards", (VICC), will be referred to as "tags". They are also known in the industry as an "transponders". A tag normally consists of the electronic circuitry (the integrated circuit and the RF coupling coil) and some kind of support structure, such as adhesive-coated paper or even a hard plastic encapsulation. If the electronics is mounted on a thin plastic film but otherwise exposed, it is called an "inlay". A "dry inlay" has no adhesive but a "wet inlay" has adhesive on one side.

The "Vicinity coupling device", (VCD), will be referred to as the "tag reader" or just "reader". It is also known in the industry as an "interrogator". Both terms rather ignore the fact that in many implementations it can also write information to the tags.

The term "Radio Frequency Identification" (RFID) is not mentioned in the ISO/IEC 15693 standard documents.

Links

• Wikipedia article (but, there's not much information there)
• Part 1 of ISO Specification, Physical characteristics (cost is 38 Swiss Francs)
• Part 2 of ISO Specification, Air interface and initialization (cost is 88 Swiss Francs)
• Part 3 of ISO Specification, Anticollision and transmission protocol (cost is 158 Swiss Francs)
• Feig Electronic GmbH HF RFID Products
• ThingMagic HF Embedded HF RFID Readers
• Smartrac HF RFID tags