RFID technology provider Impinj Inc. today announced that it will purchase Intel Corp.’s RFID operation for an undisclosed sum. Under the auspices of Intel’s New Business Initiatives incubator, the company’s RFID unit brought to market the R1000 RFID reader chip.

Today, Impinj officials said the chip, which Impinj has rebranded the Indy R1000, was central to the acquisition. The R1000 incorporates 90% of an RFID reader’s components on a single chip and is designed for many form factors, such as fixed, mobile, and embedded RFID readers, according to Impinj. The R1000 will lend itself to RFID readers used in supply chain management, asset tracking, authentication, and access control, the company said in a statement.

Impinj’s adoption of the R1000 into its ultra-high frequency (UHF) Gen 2 RFID family of tags and readers will give the company a leg up in the RFID market, said Evan Fein, vice president of finance and administration for Impinj, in an interview with Managing Automation. The company plans to use the chip as a stepping-stone to a broader product portfolio. In particular, the addition of the densely packed Intel chip gives Impinj the ability to create smaller, more portable readers — or sell to OEMs that produce such readers, Fein said. Indeed, most buyers will be manufacturers of RFID readers, he said.

Michael Liard, an analyst at ABI Research, a company that specializes in RFID research, said in an interview with Managing Automation that the move by Impinj demonstrates the importance of the UHF space. Overall, he said, “The RFID market is mature and the emerging areas are [in the] UHF space.” Liard echoed Fein’s comments, saying the R1000 will help Impinj compress many components into one chip, which, he said, “reduces design complexity and puts it into a smaller form factor, which makes it a lower cost.” The acquisition of Intel’s RFID assets clears the way for Impinj to “become a critical piece of the reader marketplace,” he said.

Impinj, founded in 2000, is based in Seattle, WA. The company’s product lines take their names from car racing, including the Speedway RFID readers, the Monza tag chips, and the Indy R1000 reader chips.