Background: NFC turns cell phones into wallets

But the mobile phone needs to pay for a reader to be kept. In addition to mobile operators and handset manufacturers use, credit card companies and online payment systems like PayPal to NFC. The transmission standard for NFC was developed in 2002 by NXP Semiconductors (formerly Philips) and Sony. It is a special development of RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) for the digital capture of objects or animals.


In the center of the NFC technology is a chip containing the data for the Near Field. This may be about to make a payment required data, or other applications, the employee data for the review of right of entry into a building. The new ID card uses its built-in NFC chip, here are the readable data of the document stored.

The so-called air interface for reading the most encrypted data with a reader is limited in practice on a range of less than 50 centimeters, as the project manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology (SIT) in Darmstadt, Michael Herfert said. The energy for the transfer of the chip is powered by the electromagnetic field of the reader.

Once current begins to flow, chip and reader can communicate with each other in both directions. It is a half-duplex mode, a data exchange can occur in a particular time in only one direction. Thus, the reader asks for a payment process for credit card number and expiration date. The chip then transmits the requested information.

Smart phones with integrated NFC technology were presented, among others, Samsung. In Asia, particularly Japan, NFC phones have already found a wider distribution than in Europe or the USA. The expected for this year next issue of the iPhone by Apple is according to unconfirmed reports also support NFC. Also, Google has built an NFC interface in its smartphone operating system Android.