The chips will be designed to meet the stringent security requirements for MasterCard’s line of radio frequency identification (RFID) payment cards and tokens.
The 13.56 MHz RFID chip is part of a series of solutions based on Texas Instruments’ (TI) ISO/IEC 14443 technology platform, which features products with universally accepted and standardized cryptography using US National Institute of Standards and Technology approved crypto algorithms.
The ISO/IEC 14443 standard is expected to support significantly faster rates of data exchange (up to 848 kbits per second), enabling more complex security information to be passed between an RFID card and reader without affecting the user’s experience. Read ranges for products based on the ISO/IEC 14443 platform are also limited to 4 centimeters (roughly 1.5 inches), in a further attempt to increase the security of the transaction.
TI believes that its solutions will provide a significant opportunity to exploit the expansion of credit and bank card issuers throughout the US and into other countries.
The December 2004 Nilson Report indicated that payment card manufacturers shipped 4.38bln units to card issuers such as Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and Discover, and retailers (both credit and pre-paid cards) in 2003. MasterCard reported a 6.6% increase in its issuance over the same period, and hope to expand upon this with TI’s new technology.
