A Multi-protocol Baseband Modem Processor for a Mobile RFID Reader

In RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) systems, a tag reader communicates with tags, reads their identification codes, and accesses their related database through network infrastructure. There are many research activities in RFID systems for industrial applications such as delivery, manufacturing, and so on, but there is few on mobile devices such as cellular phones and PDAs. This paper presents architecutre of a multi-protocol RFID reader on mobile devices. We have considered several design parameters, such as low power consumption, cost effectiveness and flexibility. We prototyped our system on the ARM-based Excalibur FPGA with iPAQ PDA, and also a chip with 0.18um technology for verification of our architecture.