Contactless smartcard

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20 March 2013 Telecoms, Datacoms, Wireless, IoT

EM Microelectronic has developed the EM4333, a contactless smartcard designed to fulfil the specific needs of secure access control, public transportation, loyalty cards, electronic door locks or leisure park applications. This dual ISO/IEC14443A and ISO/IEC15693 compliant transponder enables merging of vicinity and proximity applications on the same media card using the same antenna.

The circuit’s low power consumption allows operation in field strengths down to 0,05 A/m for ISO/IEC15693 and for the ISO/IEC14443A interface. The card implements an enhanced auto-detection mechanism enabling it to distinguish whether a command sent by the RFID reader is following the ISO/IEC15693 or the ISO/IEC14443A protocol.

An embedded accurate field strength detector ensures that the ISO/IEC14443 part is powered only in strong field conditions, thus ensuring the range of ISO/IEC15693 is not affected by the high-speed ISO/IEC14443A mode. The vicinity interface supports all modes specified by the ISO/IEC15693-2/3 standards, including all mandatory, most optional, and in addition a number of custom commands.

The ISO/IEC15693 communication channel provides security based on Grain 128A, a public stream cipher which uses 128-bit keys, supports three-pass mutual authentication, secure messaging and message authentication code (MAC).

The proximity RF interface is configurable by software and supports ISO/IEC 14443A with data transfer rates up to 848 Kbps. The ISO/IEC14443A is operated by a 8051 CPU providing full flexibility given by customer operating software. The core offers AES-128, DES/3-DES and DMA co-processors.

The CPU is software compatible with the industry standard 8051 8-bit microprocessor, to guarantee the maximum reuse of software. The hardware implementation of the core is a modern design not relying on microcode.

The EM4333 offers 4 KB of user data EEPROM that can be shared between ISO/IEC15693 and ISO/IEC14443A. Both protocols can access the same data from different applications. The chip also offers 64 KB of code EEPROM to host the operating system and any data that does not require regular updating (eg, pictures), accessible through the ISO/IEC14443A protocol.

Powerful development tools are fully integrated into Keil’s μVision3/4 environment providing an efficient and user friendly development platform. An EMX43 emulator with RF extension allows fast and efficient development and debugging directly in the customer application.

EM Microelectronic delivers a low level library of code samples, which supports all transport layers of ISO14443-3/4 in Type A. The library functions allow easy and fast porting of customer software to the device.

For more information visit www.emmicroelectronic.com

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