Patent ID: 7890080

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a transmitter to transmit an outbound radio frequency (RF) signal; and a receiver to receive a radio frequency identification (RFID) signal in response to the transmitted RF signal, demodulate the received signal in an analog front end, convert a demodulated signal from an analog form into a digital signal, and process the digital signal in a digital back end, the receiver including a digital signal processor (DSP) to process the digital signal, wherein the DSP includes a filter decimator to provide low-pass filtering on an oversampled data stream of the digital signal and decimation to a lower frequency, a band-pass filter coupled to receive an output signal of the filter decimator to eliminate noise and interference outside a bandwidth of the output signal of the filter decimator, a matched filter in combination with a programmable sequence generator that is programmable to accommodate multiple RFID communication protocols to perform a protocol-specific sequence correlation computation on an output signal of the band-pass filter, a power estimator coupled to measure estimation of the correlation computation, a data slicer to recover data and a collision detector to detect collisions when collisions occur in recovering the data, in which the data slicer and the collision detector are coupled down stream from the power estimator.