Design and Implementation of An ECC-Based Digital Baseband Controller for RFID Tag Chip

The extremely constrained resource has hindered the efforts to implement the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) into a radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag chip. In this paper, an ECC-based RFID digital baseband controller (DBC), which is compatible with ISO/IEC 14443 and Schnorr authentication protocol, is presented. In order to achieve low resources consumption and fast ECC computation speed, some techniques, such as the register reuse, clock multiplexer, and asynchronous counter, are adopted in this design. In addition, a linear feedback shift register-based stream encryption scenario is proposed for the data security. According to the synthesis result, the gate area and power consumption of DBC are 25.7 K and 14.7 μW, respectively, in UMC 0.13 μm CMOS technology. All of those characteristics make the realization of ECC-based DBC for RFID tag chip promising.