March 12, 2012 08:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time
New Tag is NFC Forum-Compliant, Offers Best Price-to-Capacity Profile
AIX-EN-PROVENCE, France--()--INSIDE Secure, a leader in semiconductor solutions for secure transactions and digital identity, today announced the availability of the MicroPass® 4101-2K, the first true NFC Forum tag to offer ample memory capacity for demanding applications at an affordable price. Based on the proven INSIDE Secure MicroPass platform, the cost-effective MicroPass 4101-2K is fully compliant with the NFC Forum Type 4 tag requirements with 2K bytes of memory, enough to store long URLs, business cards, phone numbers, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth pairing information and other application data that can be read by any NFC-enabled device.
According to Vian, the NFC Forum specifies four NFC tag types as the backbone of interoperability between NFC tag providers and NFC device manufacturers to ensure a uniform user experience. Because tags based on MIFARE Classic technology do not comply with the NFC Forum specifications and require NFC devices to utilize a proprietary protocol stack to read them, these tags will not work with all NFC devices, creating user frustration.“Until now, application developers have faced the dilemma of either paying too much for a true NFC Forum tag with enough memory for their applications, or using a more cost-effective but proprietary solution based on MIFARE® Classic technology that presents interoperability issues,” said Bernard Vian, executive vice president of NFC and Payment Solutions at INSIDE Secure. “The MicroPass 4101-2K solves this dilemma by hitting the NFC tag sweet spot, providing developers with a truly compliant NFC Forum Type 4 tag that has sufficient memory at an affordable price and that can be read by any NFC device. With this introduction, we are ending the problem of NFC tag incompatibility.”
At its core, the MicroPass 4101-2K is based on INSIDE’s award-winning MicroPass intelligent payment platform, regarded by most in the industry as the gold standard for contactless payments. The MicroPass product is at the heart of the majority of contactless bank cards issued in the U.S. and Canada, powering more than 30 issuer programs. The MicroPass platform was launched at CARTES 2005, and continues to achieve unprecedented success as the industry’s platform of choice for a broad range of applications, with more than 280 million MicroPass devices shipped to date.
Availability and Pricing
The INSIDE Secure MicroPass 4101-2K NFC Forum Type 4 tag and a companion development and personalization kit are available now. Please contact INSIDE Secure for pricing and other information.
About INSIDE Secure
INSIDE Secure (NYSE Euronext Paris: INSD) is a leading designer, developer and supplier of semiconductors, embedded software and platforms for secure transactions and digital security. INSIDE mobile NFC, secure payment, and digital security products provide security for a wide range of information processing, storage and transmission applications. The company’s customers are found in a wide range of markets including mobile payment, identification documents, access control, transit, electronic device manufacturing, pay television and mobile service operators. For more information, visit www.insidesecure.com.