A measurement platform for RFID protocol conformance test

A measurement platform which aims to develop and verify Ultra High Frequency Radio Frequency Identification (UHF RFID) protocols is introduced in this paper. In contrast to other measurement platforms or tools, it can measure instantaneous signal of the processing, track waveform of the “handshake” communication and analyze the monitoring result in real time. The main task of this paper is to implement and verify three kinds of RFID protocols using this platform, the reliability evaluations, feasibility and security of RFID protocols must be effectively tested. The measurement platform includes antenna, RF analog front end (AFE), FPGA, USB interface and microcontroller. The RF AFE contains transmitter, receiver, comparison circuit, etc. The FPGA chip which is designed to implement the protocol baseband commands processing, FLASH and JTAG are constituted the base band processor. Microcontroller is used to control and measure the operation process of these protocols with FPGA communication interface. USB interface is used to accomplish data transmitting between upper computer and microcontroller. The advantage of this architecture is that it can be used to develop and verify various kinds of RFID standards, and efficiently reduces the design and development time and cost. The platform achieves rapid, flexible and efficient verification and development by changing the digital baseband in FPGA.