Digital detection system for RF-identification

Abstract

A South African company, iPico, developed an analogue detection system for RF-Identification tags. This device is however not as robust as it should be. Therefore it was decided to attempt to design and build a digital equivalent of this system. The development of this digital system was divided into two phases; firstly a simulation program was developed and tested. This was to determine if this digital system would be able to perform as good as, or even better than the analogue system. The final simulation software is built up out of numerous components, including time domain and frequency domain filtering and an intelligent detection scheme to filter out the data. The second phase was the implementation of the algorithms into hardware. This hardware consists of a DSP processor and an AD converter from Texas Instruments. Using this hardware, it was possible to implement the algorithms. The final results of a few thorough tests illustrated that the digital system would be able to beat the old analogue system, whereby the digital system can still be further optimized. There are, however, a few remarks about the execution time, hardware optimizations and the non-optimized algorithms for specific undocumented situations.