Vicinity Integrated Circuit Card Emulation of ISO15693 in NFC Devices

Abstract: This thesis describes the work flow of integrating a new digital design in an existing integrated circuit, the SN100V designed by NXP. The new digital design enables theSN100V for emulating ISO 15693 card, which is not available yet in any near field radio device. ISO 15693 is used at skiing lifts for example, and a NFC device could replace the card for access in such situations. The timings and response times are derived from the specifications of ISO 15693. The SN100V currently is unable to respond in time. This is solved by running two different phase locked loops in parallel, one for the accuracy that is needed by other standards, and one that can lock quickly so that the SN100V can start receiving ISO 15693 frames within the required time. Furthermore the system requires two more modules, a demodulator and transmitter. The demodulator can decode both 1-out-of-4 and 1-out-of-256 encodings. Both are used by a reader device, where the latter is the slower one. The transmission of ISO15693 is done with both analogue shift keying and frequency shift keying. The required bit rates were not supported, thus a new bit rate generator was implemented. Also, there was no support for frequency shift keying whatsoever, so this functionality also had to be implemented. After implementation the whole system was tested and verified using loopback tests, which shorts the transmitting end with the receiving end. As there was no support for frequency shift keying demodulation, it had to be done visually and measuring the timing.  In the end everything was verified,and the new timing constraints were met.