Design of a UHF RFID tag baseband with the hummingbird cryptographic engine

Radio frequency identification (RFID) is a technology for automatic object identification. It has wide applications in many areas such as manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, and so on. However, many RFID systems are suffering from security issues. In this paper, we present an implementation of a secure UHF RFID tag baseband with a Hummingbird (HB) cryptographic engine using the SMIC 0.13μm technology. An improvement of the Gen2 protocol based on our secure engine is proposed to enhance security. The implementation results show that the area of our baseband is 16,986 gate equivalents and the secure engine takes 23.6% of the entire die area. The overall power consumption of our baseband is 30.67μW at a clock frequency of 1.28MHz and with 1.2V power supply, which is suitable for resource-constrained RFID tags.