Patent ID: 7583179

Claim:
An apparatus comprising: a transmitter to transmit a radio frequency identification (RFID) signal to a RFID transponder; and a receiver to receive a RFID reply signal from the RFID transponder, demodulate the received signal in an analog front end that includes a local oscillator and at least one mixer for demodulation of the received signal, convert the received signal from an analog form into a digital signal, and process the digital signal in a digital back end, in which the digital back end includes a digital signal processor (DSP) to process the digital signal and in which 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 to eliminate noise and interference outside a signal bandwidth, a matched filter in combination with a programmable sequence generator that is programmable with protocol-specific sequences to compute correlations between the digital signal and the protocol-specific sequences each corresponding to a particular RFID communication protocol, a power estimator to measure estimation of the correlations, a data slicer to recover data and a collision detector to detect collisions when collisions occur in the data recovery, wherein the transmitter and the receiver, including the DSP, are manufactured on a single complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuit chip and the matched filter and the programmable sequence generator are programmable to accommodate multiple RFID protocols to be processed by the matched filter.