Hardware implementation of an EAN-13 bar code decoder

This paper presents an FPGA hardware implementation of a bar code decoder using the EAN-13 standard. The design was implemented on an FPGA situated on an ATMEL FPLSIC (field programmable system level integrated circuit, AT94K40-25DQC). The design has comparable performance and is in many ways more robust than commercially available devices. However, to the authors' knowledge, these all use a microprocessor while our design is purely dedicated hardware.