Alien Technology has released its new compact ALR-9900-EMA reader, designed to outperform its 866MHz predecessors in half the footprint, according to Alien.

The new reader supports near-field and far-field coupling, and includes an Alien Reader Protocol (ARP) engine for autonomous mode of operation as well as full support for Alien’s Higgs-3 based inlay portfolio, which was honored as “top ranking” by the European EPC Competence Center earlier this year.

The ALR-9900-EMA is backwards compatible to its predecessor, the ALR-8800 reader. It supports four independent read zones with a monostatic design (single antenna per zone) and features a Dense Reader Mode that prevents interference in high congestion situations where multiple tags need to be read at once.

The compact 18 cm x 20 cm reader is also designed to save energy, with a low duty-cycle ‘Sniff-‘n-Read’ feature designed to activate the reader only when tags are detected in the RF field.

Additional features include: RSSI (tag signal strength) and velocity filters to help alleviate stray tag reads; I/O data streaming capabilities for monitoring external sensors; software compatibility with marquee software providers; anti-counterfeit authentication and read cloaking for security.