In modern radio technology the six-port approach promises to be cheap and extremely broadband alternative to conventional direct conversion receivers. The combination of software defined radio and six-port technology provides flexible system configuration, significant reduction in hardware cost and low fabrication requirements. The performances of six-port circuits in digital receivers show promising applications of the six-port technology for direct digital conversion demodulation reception.

However, in the state-of-art six-port radios the hybrid couplers and the power divider make the six-port receiver complicated and increase fabrication costs. In addition, the local oscillator and input RF signals can interference each to other.

Martec's multiport radio receiver eliminates the hybrid couplers (phase shifters) and the power divider and provides low cost receiver on-single-chip solution. The central idea of the novel technology is to simplify passive six-port circuit and improve the performance of the receiver by intelligent digital signal processing.

Since six-port technique originates from phase and reflection coefficient measurements it seamlessly fits for the backscattered RFID technology. Martec's approach is to utilize the carrier instead of its suppression and combine it with backscattered signal. This allows detecting amplitude and phase changes (demodulating) as well as integrating Martec's six-port RFID reader solution on single chip. Multi-modulation ability can improve security performance and increase data rate.

On-chip integration of the Martec's six-port RFID reader (interrogator) allows embedding it into any device, e.g. a mobile phone or PDA. Martec's multiport RFID solution is a promising and advantageous alternative to the near-field communications (NFC) due to high security whilst relatively long operational ranges are possible.