Seattle chip supplier Impinj announced a significant deal today to apply its radio frequency technology to the pharmaceutical industry.

Purdue Pharma, which makes OxyContin and other prescription pain medication, will use Impinj RFID chips and readers in its high-speed packaging lines starting this spring.

The drug company said item-level RFID tags, which store a unique ID number describing the type of drug on each bottle, will help it improve product security from the factory to the pharmacy.

Impinj supplies the chips inside the tags and the tag readers. The system could read more than 1,000 tags per second during advance testing, Impinj said. In environments with multiple systems nearby, each emitting radio frequencies, the technology could read 200 tags per second reliably.