Physical layer design automation for RFID systems

While RFID is starting to become a ubiquitous technology, the variation between different RFID systems still remains high. This paper describes a design automation flow for fast implementation of the physical layer component of new RFID systems. Physical layer features are described using waveform features, which are used to automatically generate physical layer encoding and decoding hardware blocks. We present automated implementations of five protocols related to RFID including Manchester encoding for ultra high frequency (UHF) active tags, pulse interval encoding (PIE) for UHF passive tags, and modified miller encoding for lower frequency RFID tags. We have targeted reconfigurable devices to allow changes in the design and compared these implementations with a standard cell ASIC target.