Near Field Communication
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Near Field Communication Technology or NFC, is a short-range wireless technology mainly aimed at usage in mobile phones. It is jointly developed by Sony and Philips.
It was approved as an ISO/IEC standard on December 8, 2003. It was approved as an ECMA standard earlier on.On March 18, 2004 Nokia, Sony and Philips formed NFC-forum to advance NFC development.
Near Field Communication Technology holds the promise of bringing true mobility to consumer electronics in an intuitive and psychologically comfortable way since the devices can "hand-shake" (talk to each other) only when brought literally into touching distance.
A patent licensing program for NFC is currently under development by Via Licensing Corporation.
So far fourteen mobile network operators, who together represent 40% of the global mobile market back NFC and are working together to develop NFC applications. They are Bouygues Telecom, China Mobile, Cingular Wireless, KPN, Mobilkom Austria, Orange, SFR, SK Telecom, Telefonica Móviles España, Telenor, TeliaSonera, Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM), Vodafone and 3. These 14 firms are part of the GSM Association, which represents 700 mobile operators around the world.[1]
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[edit] NFC Forum
The Near Field Communication (NFC) Forum is a non-profit industry association founded by Nokia Corporation, Royal Philips Electronics and Sony Corporation to advance the use of NFC short-range wireless interaction in consumer electronics, mobile devices and PCs. The NFC Forum will promote implementation and standardisation of NFC technology to ensure interoperability between devices and services.
[edit] Uses and Applications
NFC technology is currently mainly aimed at being used with mobile phones. This could mean many new applications and uses for a mobile phone thanks to NFC such as the ability to be used as:
- Car keys, house/office keys, hotel room keys, etc
- Money
- Tickets - plane tickets, concert/event tickets, other tickets etc
- Travel cards
- I.D.
- Electronic/smart wallet
[edit] Essential specifications
- Works by magnetic field induction. It operates within the globally available and unregulated RF band of 13.56 MHz.
- Working distance: 0-20 centimeters
- Speed: 106 kbit/s, 212 kbit/s or 424 kbit/s
- Passive Communication Mode: The Initiator device provides a carrier field and the target device answers by modulating existing field. In this mode, the Target device may draw its operating power from the Initator-provided electro-magnetic field.
- Active Communication Mode: Both, Initiator and Target device communicate by generating their own field. In this mode, both devices typically need to have a power supply.
- NFC can be used to configure and initiate other wireless network connections such as Bluetooth or WiFi
[edit] Standards
NFC is an open platform technology standardized in ECMA-340 and ISO/IEC 18092. These standards specify the modulation schemes, coding, transfer speeds and frame format of the RF interface of NFC devices, as well as initialization schemes and conditions required for data collision-control during initialization-for both passive and active NFC modes. Furthermore, they also define the transport protocol, including protocol activation and data-exchange methods. Air interface for NFC is standardized in:
- ISO/IEC 18092/ECMA-340 : Near Field Communication Interface and Protocol-1(NFCIP-1)
- ISO/IEC 21481/ECMA-352 : Near Field Communication Interface and Protocol-2 (NFCIP-2)
