For the surface acoustic wave (SAW) tag with pulse time delay and phase coding, the radio frequency identification (RFID) system is designed, and the zero intermediate frequency (IF) quadrature demodulation scheme is adopted in the readerreceiving link. We manufactured the tags with the coding capacity of nearly 3 million as well as the miniaturized reader hardware circuit using a fourlayer printed circuit board (PCB) structure. A portable SAW RFID system is set up through the integrated layout of the hardware circuit, the ceramic antenna, and the LCD screen, and the transmit/receive chains as well as the return loss of the ceramic antenna are tested accordingly. The identification distance of the portable system is 50 cm, and the LCD screen can not only display the identification result, but also display the image information to debug the system in real time.