Design and Implementation of a Multi-protocol UHF RFID Tag Simulation Platform

To raise the RFID UHF reader’s performance, a test environment must be established. Using a lot of real tags to establish a test bed may induce some demerits, such as high resources costs and so on. So some institutions which engaged in RFID research developed some simulation systems for algorithm designing to provide reference information and technical support. 1. TI Gen2 standard tag simulator TI (Texas Instrument Company) which is the world’s largest RFID reader and transponder producer, developes a Gen2 standard tag simulator and provides to 5 main RFID reader and printer producers. This research is going on with the Gen2 standard product development in parallel, aiming to keep the compatibility between the transponder with the RFID reader and printer based on the UHF Gen2 standard. The tag simulator can generate 96bit codes and has other abilities defined by the EPC Gen2 protocol, is very helpful to the EPC Gen2 standard products development. 2. RFID tag simulator by CISC The main part of the CISC RFID tag simulator is a high power and multifilament FPGA chip. The sensor modules are connected to the simulation tools. These sensor modules play a very important role in many simulations and tests. The tag simulator has an unprecedented creativity virtue that the user can determine the tag’s parameters based on different applications. Tags simulated can be completely controlled by setting the parameters to determine the worst and best cases. The simulator can not only be used for general tests, but can also be used for the reader’s test at the case of boundary defined. The real tags can’t be used for this test because the boundary parameters can’t be adjusted. So, CISC sensor modules and tag simulator can be used together to emulate the UHF RFID tag to verify and analysis the UHF RFID system. CISC tag simulator can emulate at most 16 tags, each tag have a separate RF module, to be equivalent to 16 real tags. 3. MATLAB used for RFID anti-collision simulation Besides the tag simulators produced by the TI and CISC, there are several ways of RFID simulation reported, such as the way of using MATLAB to emulate the anti-collision algorithm, the way of using DSP and FPGA to establish a RFID system, and so on, and provide some reference values to the tag simulation design.