Motorola Inc is betting on the Smart Card taking over a whole range of applications currently performed by other technologies, and is to increase its production capacity for the microcontrollers that others embed in their cards tenfold to meet the expected demand. The company forecasts that the market for the embeddable chips will grow to over $1,000m by 2000 from under $100m today – and it claims to be the world’s leading supplier of the chips. It is putting in capacity to produce 10m of the chips per week by the year 2000, Allan Hughes, the company’s Smart Card operations manager, told euters. He declined to specify the precise investment involved, but said Motorola is investing $2,500m worldwide in semiconductor facilities during 1995, with a significant proportion of the sum being dedicated to the cards. The biggest boost is expected to come from credit card companies making the switchover.
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