Inside Contactless has taken a further step towards making its Open NFC technology available to all by making its source code and API documentation available to download from the Sourceforge.net open source website.

Open NFC, which is designed to make it simpler and easier for manufacturers to add NFC functionality to mobile phones and other devices, was first made available on request under an Apache license in February. Now, anyone will be able to access Open NFC without needing to go through any kind of approval process.

The Open NFC protocol stack is made up of some 300,000 lines of code and provides a complete NFC middleware solution for mobile phones, embedded products and other devices and includes Android, Windows Mobile, Linux and Java (JSR-257) editions.

Open NFC supports various levels of functionality, from low-level RF control to high-level NFC Forum Tag handling, peer-to-peer communications, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi pairing, interactions with single-wire protocol SIMs and other secure elements, and offers compatibility with smart cards and RFID tags based on Felica, Mifare and ISO 14443 standards.

“The first phase of our Open NFC project has been a very important success,” Loic Hamon, vice president products and marketing for Inside Contactless’ NFC business, has told NFC World. “We have had contact over the last two or three months with a lot of handset manufacturers as well as many mobile operators. Now the code and the API will be available on Sourceforge so that everybody can play with the code.”

“We are already in discussion with major industry players to support Open NFC as the de facto standard NFC stack for the Android, MeeGo, Linux and Windows Mobile platforms,” explains Philippe Martineau, executive vice president of Inside’s NFC business. “Open NFC offers a number of benefits to these stakeholders including an open, consistent API across all NFC hardware, faster time to market and greater flexibility. Now, with this source code release, Open NFC is the undisputed de facto NFC protocol stack solution in the industry.”

The source code and API documentation will be available on SourceForge at sourceforge.net/projects/open-nfc/ from May 15 and an NFC chip simulator and board will be released to developers by the end of the third quarter of 2010. Like NXP and Trusted Logic, Inside also says it will be proposing Open NFC to the Open Handset Alliance (OHA) as the reference implementation for adding NFC to Android devices.

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