As UHF RFID prevails in the deployment of supply chain automation, the technology is also starting a paradigm shift into the item-level applications, where near-field-communication (NFC) with individual items plays an important role in product verification, authentication and proof-of-transaction. NFC RFID readers are expected to be widely used as mobile devices where mobility and security are of the greatest concerns. However, today’s UHF RFID protocols do not have enough security mechanisms built in; The readers are too complicated to operate, consume too much power and are too expensive. In fact, most NFC applications only require a tiny fraction of all reader features, most other functions are not only over-kill, but drastically increase the reader cost and power consumption as well. This project will propose a low-cost and lightweight RFID reader chip that is tailor-made for NFC applications with the following features: 1) Proprietary secured communication engine compatible with current UHF Gen2 protocols. 2) Reduced complexity of Gen2 functional set that retains only those needed for NFC applications. 3) Significantly reduced power consumption. 4) Minimized silicon cost and peripherals that result in significantly reduced system integration cost. Nevertheless, the proposed chip will still be compatible with other commercial UHF Gen2 tags.