This standard has been defined by the NFC Forum, led by Philips, Nokia and Sony. The great attractive of NFC technology is its ease of use; by simply bringing two NFC devices closed to each other the exchange of data is established without the need to configure the connection manually. NFC standard encompasses the RFID technology, therefore NFC devices working in card emulation profile are fully compatible with the RFID infrastructure.

In typical use cases one of the NFC devices that forms the connection will be a cellular phone. The most important mobile phones manufacturers have already announced devices with NFC in 2011. The applications that come up from this scenario are mobile payment (e.g. Google Wallet), access control, NFC tickets for events and concerts, mobile payment in public transportation, smart posters, and many more.

Products & Services

TST has been working with NFC technology since its origins. For this reason TST is able to offer you apps for iPhone, Android and others platforms that make use of the NFC interface available in the mobile phone. TST has also developed a NFC module for its wireless communication platform TSmarT as can be seen below.

Projects

Making use of the TSmarT platform with the NFC module we have designed a NFC card reader for hospitals that places an order to the warehouse through GPRS, Wi-Fi and/or Ethernet in order to automatically replace the products that we have been consumed at the hospital. This system has been installed at hospitals and medical centers.

Technology

NFC technology works at 13.56 MHz frequency band (available worldwide license-free) with bitrates between 106 kbps and 848 kbps. There are 4 types of NFC cards (among them the well-known Mifare from Philips and FeliCa from Sony) according to its memory capacities, safety, configurability and number of reading/writing cycles. Typical memory varies between 96 and 512 bytes. One of the devices involved in the NFC communication can work in passive mode without own energy, simply taking advantage of the electromagnetic field generated by the active device. There are 3 operation profiles:

Reader/Writer: The NFC device is active and it reads or writes a NFC or RFID passive tag. Smart posters or access control are typical applications for this profile.
Card emulation: The NFC device behaves as a passive RFID card to work with the installed base of RFID readers already in place.
Peer-to-Peer: Two NFC devices exchange data, e.g. business card or photos using the mobile phone.