Impinj, NEC TOKIN and NEC Partner to Deliver High Performance Gen 2 RFID Readers in Japan

  Impinj, Inc., the number one supplier of Gen 2 Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) chips and readers, and NEC TOKIN Corporation, located in Sendai City, Japan, today announced an agreement to co-develop RFID readers for the Japanese market.

Under the agreement, Impinj will adapt its Speedway Gen 2 RFID readers to conform to Japanese radio frequency regulations.  NEC TOKIN will develop and market its own brand of RFID reader products based on the Speedway platform for the Japanese market.  The agreement also includes a partnership with NEC Corporation, NEC TOKINs parent company.  NEC will offer the Powered by Impinj readers, with NECs RFID Manager middleware, as part of its systems integration business.  The middleware manages the electronic product code (EPC) information streaming from the readers and sends the data on to warehouse and enterprise management systems.   The companies first joint deployment will be an installation at NECs Personal Products Co., Ltd., the PC manufacturer, in Yonezawa. 

Impinjs Speedway reader received the EPCglobal Gen 2 standard certification mark and has been successfully installed in large North American retail and distribution environments that require RFID technology to improve supply chain efficiency. Speedway exhibits unprecedented levels of performance and was recently demonstrated to support item-level RFID tracking for pharmaceuticals, apparel, CD/DVDs and many other high value products.

NEC TOKIN is very pleased to be able to make Impinjs world-class RFID reader technology available to Japanese customers, said Takeji Takeda, General Manager of Access Devices Marketing Division at NEC TOKIN Corporation. RFID technology is very important to many leading retail and product companies and we look forward to helping those customers, beginning with NEC Personal Products Co., improve their supply chain efficiency with new RFID products.

Impinjs collaboration with NEC TOKIN is very exciting for the global RFID market, said William Colleran, president and CEO at Impinj.  Our partnership allows us to make the highest performance and highest quality RFID readers available to Japanese companies in a number of important market sectors.

About NEC Corporation

NEC Corporation (NASDAQ: NIPNY) is one of the world's leading providers of Internet, broadband network and enterprise business solutions dedicated to meeting the specialized needs of its diverse and global base of customers. NEC delivers tailored solutions in the key fields of computer, networking and electron devices, by integrating its technical strengths in IT and Networks, and by providing advanced semiconductor solutions through NEC Electronics Corporation. The NEC Group employs more than 140,000 people worldwide and had net sales of 4,855 billion yen (approx. $45.4 billion) in the fiscal year ended March 2005.
For additional information, please visit the NEC home page at: http://www.nec.com

About NEC TOKIN Corporation

NEC TOKIN is one of the world's leading companies that offers "Material-based Best Devices Solutions" producing consistently advanced devices by its material innovation. Major products of NEC TOKIN are tantalum capacitors, lithium-ion rechargeable batteries, contactless IC cards/

RFID tags and readers/ writers, relays, EMI countermeasure parts and piezoelectric devices. NEC TOKIN had net sales of 119.4 billion yen (approx. $1.1 billion) in the fiscal year ended March 2005. For additional information, please visit the NEC TOKIN home page at: http://www.nec-tokin.com/english/

About Impinj, Inc.

Impinj, Inc. is a fabless semiconductor company whose patented Self-Adaptive Silicon technology enables its two synergistic business lines: high performance RFID products and innovative semiconductor intellectual property (IP). A leading contributor to the RFID standards for high volume supply-chain applications worldwide, Impinj leverages its technical expertise and industry partnerships to deliver the GrandPrix solution, comprising tags, readers, software and systems integration to offer RFID that just works. Impinjs innovative IP products, core to the companys RFID tags, are licensed to leading semiconductor companies worldwide, allowing them to seamlessly integrate crucial nonvolatile memory (NVM) alongside analog and digital functionality on a single chip. Impinj's IP products include the popular AEON family of embedded cores, which provides rewriteable NVM technology in logic CMOS manufacturing. For more information, visit www.impinj.com.