Multi-Channel Multi-Stage Transmultiplexing Digital Down Converter and Its Application to RFID (ISO18000-3 mode 2) Reader/Writer

Implementation of RFID reader/writer on software defined radio is studied in this paper. The target RFID is ISO18000-3 mode 2 which has 8 reply channels for simultaneous communication with 8 different RFID tags. In the software defined radio architecture, the 8 reply channels are sampled at a single A/D converter and separated by digital down converters, whereas conventional RFID architecture has redundant 8 parallel analog down converters. A novel multi-stage transmultiplexing digital down converter is proposed for efficient implementation of multi-channel digital down converter. Moreover the proposed architecture is implemented on a FPGA evaluation board, and validity of the system is confirmed on a real hardware. The proposed architecture can be applied to multi-channel receiver for dynamic spectrum system in the cognitive radio. key words: multi-channel multi-stage transmultiplexing digital down converter, software defined radio, RFID, ISO18000-3 mode 2, implementation on FPGA