The News

Inside ContactLess cooperates with Infineon on NFC

26/03/2007

Companies aim at providing joint reference NFC architecture, fully enriched with connectivity capacities and interoperable with Mifare protocol

CTIA Wireless, Orlando, FL, March 26th, 2007 – INSIDE Contactless, a world leader for contactless semiconductor chips and hardware platforms, today announced its cooperation with Infineon Technologies on the development of a joint reference architecture for next generation, interoperable NFC  solutions.

The cooperation combines the strengths and strategies of both companies to reinforce the current adoption of contactless payment and communications  technologies worldwide and ensures smooth interoperability between the transceiver of INSIDE Contactless and the security microcontrollers of Infineon  especially for NFC applications.

The planned reference architecture will notably combine INSIDE’s NFC capacities with Infineon’s secured connectivity technology, allowing banking  services to converge on the handset. This will provide new opportunities for handset manufacturers, telecom operators, banks and others media, travel  and entertainment industry to develop new mass market services.

With major industry back up in their respective fields of application, INSIDE Contactless and Infineon have decided to join forces in order to further extend the integration of their technologies, and createa favorable ground for the deployment of a new industrial ecosystem, based on new banking and telecommunications services. This way, INSIDE’s product offering will become fully interoperable with theMifare protocol, opening a wide spectrum of services, especially in the transport industry.

“Cooperating with the leading semiconductor supplier offering security in silicon fully demonstrates our capacity to deploy wide-scale, open-standard NFC projects, and is a great opportunity for INSIDEContactless” says Philippe Martineau, Executive Vice President, NFC business line for INSIDE Contactless. “Interoperability with Mifare will improve our capacity to deliver flexible solutions to ourclients across the world, and act as market facilitator for NFC adoption.”

“NFC has the potential to complement today’s contactless applications,“ said Dr. Helmut Gassel, Vice President und General Manager, Chip Card & Security ICs at Infineon Technologies. “The joint effortsof Infineon and INSIDE Contactless may speed up NFC deployment to bring convenient and secure payment to mobile devices .”  

About INSIDE Contactless:
Founded in 1995, INSIDE is headquartered in France and with global presence in China, Singapore, Poland and the USA.  INSIDE is uniquely positioned as the only fabless semiconductor company solely dedicatedto the advancement of contactless technology, leveraging one of the industry’s largest intellectual property portfolios.  Through strategic emphasis in Contactless Payments and Near Field Communications (NFC), INSIDE has been on a rapid  growth track over the past two years with more than 12M chips delivered for contactless payment cards in the US market and a dominant position in  driving NFC standardization and pilot deployments.