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Moto, STM Play Cards Standard for contactless smart card finds support By Terry Costlow, EE Times East Kilbride, Scotland -- Two major players in smart cards have teamed up to support a standard for contactless cards, an important step in building a broad infrastructure for the cards since it could expand the use of multifunction versions. The two, Motorola Inc.'s Semiconductor Products Sector and SGS-Thomson Microelectronics (STM), will develop cards based on ISO 14443. Consumers will use the cards by waving them over a reader. The standard is in the final stages of development. Contactless cards using nonstandard techniques already are being used primarily in public transportation, where the crush of people who need to get through a gate or transit point make it awkward to insert a conventional smart card into a reader and remove it. "The ability to do contactless products opens up a variety of new applications, such as transportation," said John Savage, Motorola's American smart-card business-development manager with headquarters in Hauppauge, N.Y. "When you have both contact and contactless communications on the same card, it brings it to a point where you can have open applications, doing things like transportation and finance, with both operating at a high level of security." Motorola and SGS-Thomson believe the ISO standard provides better security and wider interoperability than proprietary techniques now used in Europe, where smart cards are more widely accepted than in the United States. Philips Semiconductors (Sunnyvale, Calif.) has gained some popularity with its Mifare technique. But Savage said the two firms passed on the Philips specification because it was designed primarily for cards that use only memory chips. Motorola and SGS-Thomson make microcontrollers, and plan to integrate contactless transceiver circuitry into 8-bit cores that are widely used throughout the smart-card industry. The move to open up transportation applications by creating a single standard for contactless cards complements another trend. Over the past few months, nearly all major players have endorsed operating systems that make it possible to do more than one thing with a card. By using Sun Microsystems' Java language and Multos, an OS developed by an international consortium of major players, card makers can go beyond proprietary applications to offer the same capability that's provided by putting contact and contactless technologies on one chip: multifunctionality. "Studies in France show that no one wants to carry more than three cards," said James Farrell, a manager at Motorola's CISC Microcontroller Division (Austin, Tex.). "As smart-card usage proliferates, the ability to do more things will become increasingly important." Touted as a high-tech alternative to cash, smart cards communicate over fairly short distances, partly because--lacking batteries or other power sources--they must stay close to the transmitter in order to keep power output of the readers low. Also, on the psychological side, users must take some action or they might not think about the fact that they are spending money, leading them to believe that money stored on the card has somehow been erased or to otherwise question security and reliability. "These are typically used within 10 centimeters--this is a close-proximity link," Savage said. "The distance has to be long enough for someone to keep the card in their wallet, but short enough that they realize that a transaction has gone on. If the distance is long enough that people can just walk through the turnstile without doing anything, they don't realize or remember that money is being taken from their card." (Next article.)
[This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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