NFC is based on the ISO 18092 standard, and represents an evolution from the contactless technology (ISO 14443) used in proximity cards for ticketing, access control, and payment applications. It came about because Philips Sony had each developed proprietary contactless technologies, in Philips’ case MiFare, and in Sony’s FeliCa. At a certain point, they perceived the advantages of co-developing something that would be backward-compatible with both, enabling existing MIFARE and FeliCa infrastructures to be re-utilized wherever NFC is deployed.

Whereas contactless technology puts a passive chip and antenna on a smartcard and requires a separate source emitting an electromagnetic field to be carried in order for it to work, NFC uses active devices that can be used in a cellphone, obviating the need to carry a separate reader/writer and making the phone the instrument for payment transactions and so on. The proximity required for read functions is 10 cm. Radio frequency identification is one of the types of information that can be carried over an NFC link, though RFID data can and often does travel over greater distances too.

Heikki Huomo, CTO of Cirencester, UK-based Innovision, said there are three key use cases for NFC in the context of mobile telephony. First issmart poster service initiation where the phone is the reader and instead of being directed to a web site, it touches a poster that transmits news, Java games or whatever; it could also serve to initiate calls, the poster being set up to make a grandma’s phone call her grandchild, for instance.

Second ispeer-to-peer in which the phone can be a reader or a tag, such that two phones would touch to set up a connection, then information such as a business card could be transmitted over Bluetooth or WiFi, the same idea working between a phone and printer in a public print kiosk.

Third ispayment and ticketing in which Huomo said the phone is a tag or a credit card. An example of this is the trial Nokia ran with Vodafone in the German town of Hanau with Philips providing the NFC technology. Though it is now expanding into other areas of municipal services, local attractions, and events, its genesis was in mass-transit ticketing, and the bus network had already adopted plastic contactless cards, with readers installed at bus stops for that purpose, so it was an easy transition to the phone-based ticketing.

In addition to its semiconductor design business Innovision also markets its own NFC tags, and its Topaz tag format is one of the four mandated by the NFC Forum, alongside MiFare, FeliCa, and open-source spec. It also has a non-NFC tag for other RFID ticketing applications called Jewel.

Huomo said that, while today it makes sense to have separate reader chipsets and for some applications it always will, for mobile phones the most optimized way forward is to integrate that functionality into other silicon on the phone as an NFC front-end for Bluetooth or WiFi.

He said this phase has already begun with Innovision providing its technology to a Bluetooth silicon developer. The first samples will appear by the end of this year, though the brand will be that of our customer [the Bluetooth developer], he said. We also have WiFi companies in the pipeline.

Huomo said Innovision, which is listed on London’s AIM stock exchange, is best placed to take advantage of this phase of integration with Bluetooth and WiFi silicon through partnerships. None of the Bluetooth or WiFi semiconductor developers have their own NFC technology today, while Philips and Sony aren’t fabless service companies like us, so we have no competition in this context.