The GOLD Reference System for ISO 18000-7 Active RFID

The GOLD reference system for active RFID is a reader and a tag designed according to the latest version of the ISO 18000-7 standard for active RFID. Conformance and interoperability testing of different commercial readers and tags, require a stimulus from a common source that completely conforms to the standard, which is also programmable allowing alteration of the signal parameters within the standard and provides the transparency that is lacking in test systems today. The GOLD reader is a signal generator from National Instruments which is programmed in Labview 8.2 to provide the remote access capability through a simple user interface. The GOLD tag is the command detector circuit designed to monitor commands from commercial readers at 433 MHz and trigger a signal generator from Rhodes-Schwarz (R& S) at the appropriate time emulating a tag’s response. The GOLD reader allows the transmission of commands as and when required verifying that the commercial tag will respond to all mandatory commands irrespective of the multiple solutions employed when designing a commercial tag, without violating the standard. The GOLD tag is particularly useful to verify that a commercial reader is correctly able to detect data transmitted by a tag.