A low-cost UHF RFID tag baseband with an IDEA cryptography engine

This paper presents a practical implementation of a digital baseband for a low-cost UHF Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag, in which a cryptography engine based on International Data Encryption Algorithm (IDEA) primitive is embedded. A mutual authentication scheme enforced by the IDEA engine is proposed. The scheme can improve the security of the ISO 18000-6C protocol and meet the timing constraints of the protocol as well. The whole security-enhanced tag, including digital baseband, RF/analog frontend and memory, has been taped out using SMIC 0.18μm CMOS process. The overall power consumption of the baseband system is 8.96μW when the supply voltage is 1.2V and the clock frequency is 1.28MHz. The tag works at the back linked frequency (BLF) of 80 KHz.