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Energy management at passive terminal nodes is a critical design goal in the industrial internet of things (IoT) network. This article introduces a programmable low power remote execution unit (REU) based on an 8051 instruction set architecture (ISA) for passive radio frequency identification (RFID) applications in industrial IoT. The REU acts as a passive device processor requiring the interrogator to transmit instructions to be executed over a wireless link. This paper investigates the proposed asynchronous REU implementation with respect to the power consumption, area and speed and also provides a performance comparison to an existing clocked REU implementation. Based on the post-layout simulation results, the proposed asynchronous REU has lower power consumption when compared to the clocked REU operating at higher frequencies. Such a low power REU in the context of passive processing has a significant impact on IoT, a ubiquitous industrial application of RFID technology.

Using the existing microcontrollers in radio frequency identification (RFID)-based passive nodes requires too much power. There is a need to explore specific instruction sets of such microcontrollers based on target applications for low power. In this context, this paper describes a low-power wireless distributed single instruction multiple data (SIMD) architecture concept. This concept involves having the data and program instructions stored on a powered interrogator providing wireless supervisory control for the passive node that has a basic processing core called the remote execution unit (REU). This paper also proposes a novel REU architecture using a minimal instruction set architecture (MISA) based on 8051 µC with the goal of reducing power consumption of a wireless passive node. Post-layout simulation results indicate significant reduction in power consumption and the area occupied by REU when compared to an existing 8051 core design. This low-power programmable REU architecture targets internet of things (IoT) and passive RFID applications.