Designs tiny chips that track physical items using radio waves, requiring no battery.
At a glance
- Depends onDownstream position: depends on 18 industries, supplies 5
- ScaleMarket cap is above the global median
Designs tiny chips that track physical items using radio waves, requiring no battery.
Impinj designs the Monza chip, a passive silicon device that harvests radio energy broadcast by a reader in the 860-960 MHz UHF band and uses that harvested power to transmit back an ID and read or write memory — no battery required. Because the power-harvesting circuits are physically sized during fabrication for that specific band, not configured in software, two decades of iterative chip generations have pushed sensitivity and efficiency to levels that a new competitor cannot simply replicate by buying foundry time. Retail chains, logistics operators, and airlines have built their warehouse and tracking software directly around Impinj's ItemSense platform and Monza tags, so replacing either piece would mean rebuilding integrations or, in aviation's case, going through FAA requalification from scratch. The one thing that cannot be engineered around is the spectrum itself: if the ITU reallocated the 860-960 MHz band, every Monza chip already in the field and every reader built to match it would stop working, and no firmware update could fix that.
How does this company make money?
The company earns money in three ways. First, it charges tag manufacturers a fee for every Monza chip they buy. Second, it licences its RAIN RFID reader designs to systems integrators who build the reader hardware. Third, it charges operators a recurring subscription fee to use the ItemSense software platform that manages large-scale deployments.
What makes this company hard to replace?
Retail and logistics customers have already wired ItemSense directly into their warehouse management systems and ERP software — pulling it out would mean rebuilding those connections for a competitor's platform. Aviation customers face a separate problem: any new baggage-tracking system requires lengthy FAA requalification before it can be used, making switching slow and expensive regardless of cost. Manufacturing customers have embedded the Monza chips into custom-designed tags built for specific assembly lines, and switching chip suppliers would mean retooling those lines.
What limits this company?
The company owns no factories. It relies on TSMC and other foundry partners to manufacture the Monza chips, and those partners award production slots to whoever they choose. When demand suddenly surges — say, a Walmart-wide rollout or a new government drug-labelling rule — the company cannot simply make more chips. It has to wait for a foundry slot, and bigger customers at those foundries get priority first.
What does this company depend on?
The company cannot operate without TSMC and other foundry partners in Asia to fabricate and package the Monza chips. It also depends on the ITU Radio Regulations continuing to make the 860-960 MHz UHF band available worldwide, on GS1 maintaining the EPC Global Gen2 protocol that all RAIN RFID systems speak, and on specialized RF design tools from Cadence and Synopsys to build each new chip generation.
Who depends on this company?
Retail chains like Walmart and Macy's use Monza-based tags to track inventory across thousands of product types in real time — if chip supply stopped, that visibility would disappear. Major airports rely on the technology for automated baggage tracking and would have to fall back on manual processes. Pharmaceutical companies use it to authenticate and serialise drugs through the supply chain; losing it would break compliance with drug-tracing requirements.
How does this company scale?
Once ItemSense software and RAIN RFID reader designs are built, rolling them out to a new customer site is relatively cheap — the same software and designs work across many deployments. What does not get easier is designing the next generation of the Monza chip itself. Each new silicon generation is more complex than the last and requires a small group of specialists in RF and analog circuit design whose expertise cannot be automated or easily hired for.
What external forces can significantly affect this company?
The biggest external threat is an ITU World Radiocommunication Conference decision, which happens every four years, to restrict or reassign the 860-960 MHz band that the entire Monza architecture depends on. U.S.-China trade tensions and semiconductor export controls could also disrupt access to foundry partners. In Europe, GDPR and emerging IoT privacy rules are pushing customers to demand additional data-protection features in any tracking system, adding engineering and compliance work.
Where is this company structurally vulnerable?
Every four years, the ITU World Radiocommunication Conference reviews how radio spectrum is divided up across the world. If that body decided to reallocate or restrict the 860-960 MHz UHF band, the Monza chip would stop working as designed. The power harvesting circuits and the signal paths inside the chip are physically shaped for that specific band — this is not a software setting that can be changed. A new band would require designing a completely new chip from the ground up, throwing away two decades of accumulated design work.
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