NFC Technology
NFC technology, more commonly called ‘Near-Field Communication’ or ‘Contactless’, is the way to communicate mobile devices and smartphones with objects, devices and machines to enable users to transmit information or authenticate themselves.
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NFC Technology Systems
NFC technology, or near-field communication, allows smartphones and other NFC-enabled devices to communicate with other devices or items that contain an NFC tag.
Whether you're moving your smartphone along the shelf in a store, passing it near an artwork in a local museum, or putting your phone close to a friend's to share the latest games, near-field or ‘contactless’ technology enables you to pay, play, authenticate and learn with ease.
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Near Field
The most common applications of NFC technology are those that need a near field to communicate, such as payment gateways in retail, access control at events or on public transport, or product authentication in industrial companies.
How does NFC technology work?
Frequency and transmission speed. Like RFID, NFC operates in the 13.56 MHz radio frequency spectrum, but with power below 15 mA, so as to communicate data over distances of less than 20 cm.
NFC tags typically store between 96 and 512 bytes of data and data transfer speeds of 106 kb/s, 212 kb/s, 424 kb/s, or 848 kb/s - enough to move small packets of information practically instantaneously.
Regulations and protocols
NFC interfaces are defined and standardised under ISO and ECMA standards. ISO/IEC 18092 and ECMA-340 define communication modes for the NFC interface and its Protocol (NFCIP), an active and passive communications mode is selected, as well as the relevant modulation schemes, encodings, baud rates, frame format, collision control parameters, transport protocol and more.
ISO/IEC 21481 and ECMA-352 define NFCIP-2, which specify communication modes to minimise interference with other contactless card devices.