Date: 20/12/2010

NFC gets going with more new chips and Android support

As the momentum of adopting NFC in mobile phones building up, the wireless semiconductor vendors started unveiling new NFC chips. In last few weeks there are two NFC chips released in the market. They are BCM20203 from Broadcom for consumer devices and Samsung's new NFC chip, both with embedded nonvolatile memory such as embedded flash memory.

On the software front, Google's Android 2.3 nicknamed as Gingerbread features NFC (near field communications) support. NXP Semiconductors announced a strategic collaboration with Google to provide a complete open source software stack for Near Field Communications (NFC). The NFC stack will be fully integrated and validated on Gingerbread, says NXP.

Pushed by leading semiconductor vendors in wireless space, NFC has evolved as is a market proven technology. The NFC Forum, which takes care of providing specs for the embedded software developers has recently added four technical specifications that further define the modular architecture and interoperability parameters for NFC devices and protocols. All of NFC specs can be freely downloaded from nfc-forum.org. NFC Forum has also recently formally launched its Certification Program.
The four specs added are, NFC Digital Protocol Technical Specification, NFC Activity Technical Specification, NFC Forum Type 4 Tag Operation Specification, Version 2.0, and Signature Record Type Definition (RTD) Technical Specification.

The Sponsor members of NFC Forum are: Broadcom Corporation, INSIDE Secure, MasterCard Worldwide, Microsoft Corp., NEC, Nokia, NTT DOCOMO, Inc., NXP Semiconductors, Renesas Technology, Samsung, Sony Corporation, STMicroelectronics and Visa Inc.

According to IMS Research, in 2011,NFC-enabled phone models are expected to gain pace and the ratio of mobile phones with NFC capabilities is expected to reach 26 percent in 2015.

NFC operates at 13.56 MHz which is a global standard that can operate around the world and transfers data up to 424 Kilobits per second (Kbps), It is both a 'read' and 'write' technology that involves an interaction between an active reader device and a tag. Communications between two NFC-compatible devices occurs when they are brought within a few centimeters of one another.

Broadcom's BCM20203 NFC type 1 tag solution so low power device that it has been designed to be powered only through the energy harvested from the reader on the other side of the connection. The BCM20203 is suggested for use in headsets, mice, keyboards, 3D glasses, and remote controls.

The BCM20203 has on-chip, non-volatile memory that allows for multiple read/write cycles.