I have found a 125khz RFID Reader module in a Chinese product, which is made of the discrete components along with only two smt integrated circuits, 74hc393 and cd4069, if some one can give me the complete schematic diagram of this reader.
There are many published schematics for RFID reader where a single uP is used (no 4095 or U2270B decoders) with couple of external componets (R & C). So I think using external components to imitate U2270 is possible but in all cases you need to add a controller to extact the data (5 bytes) from the signal. So the gain in the price is not that big.