Standards with Standards & more Standards

My head is still spinning after a discussion today with the folks at BrightCard. I was looking for more information about a NFC SD Card from Wireless Dynamics & BrightCard had a great deal of knowledge to share. Like so many other technologies, there are standards with standards & more standards. Since Near Field Communications (NFC) is such a new technology & the market is basically open to so many possibilities it’s imperative that we all start talking the same language & adhering to the standards that are in place today.

A quick tutorial on some standards & language used in this market space:

To start with, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) & Near Field Communications (NFC) are not the same thing. In the market, RFID has come to refer to inventory tracking where NFC is more specific to person transactions. A key difference between RFID & NFC protocols are the way in which the master/slave relationship is handled. In RFID there is a master & a slave & the master & slave roles can now be reversed. Whereas with NFC, the role of master & slave can be reversed, you can even have a peer to peer relationship when using NFC.

Take this NFC use-case for example to better understand this role reversal. A woman walking through a subway terminal sees a movie poster with a NFC tag affixed to it. The women pulls out her NFC enabled mobile phone & reads in the information about the movie via the NFC tag affixed to the movie poster. In this scenario the movie poster is performing the master role & the mobile phone is performing the slave role. The woman then proceeds to purchase a ticket for this movie using Over The Air (OTA) technology – following the OTA purchase a ticket stub is downloaded to the woman’s mobile phone. The woman then arrives at the movie theatre & taps her mobile phone at the NFC reader installed at the checkout counter. The mobile phone pushes the movie ticket to the NFC reader fulfilling the mobile payment. The mobile phone just filled the master role & the NFC reader at the checkout performed the slave role.

You got have a standard without ISO, right? ISO14443 & 15693 are the international standards for contactless smart cards operating at a radio frequency of 13.56 MHz. ISO14443 has a range of 10cm (4 inches) & is viewed as the more secure of the two standards. ISO14443 is what the Near Field Communications protocol adheres too. ISO 15693 has a much wider range of transmission, 1 – 1.5 meters, & is more likely to be used for tracking of inventory in a warehouse (asset tracking).

It doesn’t end there. There are two main communication protocols supported under the ISO 14443 standard series – Type A & Type B. The main differences between Type A & Type B concern modulation methods, coding schemes, & protocol initialization procedures. Type A is the most common of these two types. An attempt to include legacy systems as appendixes – Type C (Sony/Japan), Type D (OTI/Israel), type E (Cubic/USA), & Type F (Legic/Switzerland) & Type G (China) – but these legacy types were not accepted as ISO-standard.

As you can see, there are a number of new standards being developed & the language we use when discussing this market is going to be complicated & messy at first. Because there is so much potential for this market & integrations are already complex enough I believe it is our responsibility as industry leaders to help define these standards & start talking the same talk.