Alien Technology used its 2010 Global User & Partner Conference to unveil its ultra-high performance Gen 2 enterprise category reader platform yesterday. The ALR-9900+ is a global enterprise category reader platform with significant performance and feature improvements over its predecessor, the ALR-9900.

Alien’s Conference, held adjacent to its RFID Solutions Center in Dayton, Ohio, drew approximately 150 users from 20 countries.

The ALR-9900+ supersedes all previous regional-specific enterprise category readers with an operational frequency band ranging from 866MHz (Europe, Middle East & Africa) to 954MHz (Japan). The ALR-9900+ is the parent model to the recently announced ALR-9900-EMA, which was specifically designed for compliance with the new ETSI EN 302-208-2 regulatory compliance standards, more commonly known as ‘the four-channel-plan’.

New technological advancements led to a global reader architecture, enabling a single hardware platform to be factory configurable to accommodate world-wide regional compliance profiles. Additionally, numerous new developments resulted in significant performance improvements as well as incorporation of several innovative features, further complementing the industry leading Alien Higgs™-3 RFID tag IC, bolstering security and authentication applications and supporting all extended and customized Higgs-3 IC features.

Beyond the advantages of a global hardware platform, the key differentiating attributes of the ALR-9900+ over its ALR-9900 predecessor include a vastly improved receiver circuit design with multiple stages of configurable digital filters and high gain, low distortion amplifiers, resulting in a dramatically more sensitive receiver. This best-in-class design provides more read range margin, most advantageous for applications using ultra-high sensitivity tags in challenging environments at extreme distance or where tag backscatter signals are constrained due to sub-optimum conditions, including use with smaller item level tags which often have limited performance.