ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,333,374, issued on June 17, was assigned to Impinj Inc. (Seattle).

"Fast frequency switching for RFID applications" was invented by Mike Thomas (Wake Forest, N.C.), Omer Onen (Redmond, Wash.), Joe Tarantino (Seattle) and Christopher J. Diorio (Shoreline, Wash.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "RFID readers may be configured to supply power to tags during frequency hops. When a reader is supplying power to a passive RFID tag via a first RF waveform having a first radio frequency and determines that it is to frequency-hop, the reader may determine whether the tag requires power during the hop. If so, the reader begins (or continues) to synthe...