The NFC and contactless specialist has teamed up with Infineon and Giesecke & Devrient to provide handset manufacturers with a single package that includes both an NFC controller and an embedded secure element.
Inside Contactless has announced a new system-in-package (SIP) NFC solution designed to make it easy for mobile and other device manufacturers to add near field communication functionality to their products.
SecuRead includes Inside Contactless’ existing MicroRead NFC controller, the company’s Open NFC protocol stack for Android, Windows Mobile, Linux and Java devices and an embedded secure element, manufactured by Infineon Technologies and running a GlobalPlatform-compliant Java Card operating system supplied by Giesecke & Devrient.
The solution is supplied as one integrated circuit containing two dies, Inside Contactless’ Loic Hamon has told NFC World, enabling device manufacturers to integrate the two NFC functions as one single component. The new package is also pin-for-pin compatible with Inside’s standalone MicroRead product, Hamon explained, meaning that device manufacturers can now build both an NFC controller and an embedded secure element into their products without having to re-engineer their designs or free up any additional space within the phone.
SecuRead has already been selected by a leading mobile device manufacturer for use in NFC mobile device products due out in 2011, Hamon adds.
As well as providing handset manufacturers with the potential to deliver their own services to consumers via the embedded secure element, SecuRead also supports HID Global‘s iClass virtual credentials and is compatible with HID’s Trusted Identity Platform (TIP) for access control and other emerging NFC applications.
“Trusted applications like banking and payment demand the highest level of proven security in their hardware and their operating systems, and this is what our secure element brings to the SecuRead SIP solution,” explains Juergen Spaenkuch, director, platform security at Infineon Technologies. “Infineon’s secure element chip dedicated to NFC applications has been certified to the highest proven security certifications and type approvals such as Common Criteria EAL 5+ (high) and EMVCo. The chip also offers an optimized interface to the MicroRead NFC controller, thereby enabling Inside to create a superior product to meet current and future requirements of the mobile industry.”
“Our high-performance Java Card solutions, such as the one employed by SecuRead, are tailored to the specific needs of markets with the highest security requirements such as payment, transit, access control and other mobile applications,” adds Axel Deininger, head of the payments division at G&D.
“The new SecuRead best-of-breed solution is the fastest path to implementing iClass virtual credentials in NFC mobile phones,” says Dr Tam Hulusi, senior vice president at HID Global. “Through our longstanding partnership with Inside, iClass support is now a standard feature of SecuRead. For users looking to put iClass virtual credentials on mobile phones, this is great news.”
Engineering samples will be available from December 2010 and production quantities of the SecuRead solution are set to follow in April 2011.
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