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Texas Instruments has announced its intent to produce ISO/IEC 14443 compliant RFID chips to meet the security requirements for MasterCard International's PayPass line of RFID payment cards and tokens.
TI expects to submit its product for MasterCard certification in the second quarter of 2005, and the company hopes to begin full production in the second half of 2005. The company's new 13.56 MHz chip is the latest in a series based on its ISO/IEC 14443 platform, which features products with standardised cryptography using National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) approved cryptography algorithms (such as Triple DES and SHA-1).
The ISO/IEC 14443 standard can provide an increased level of security because it supports faster rates of data exchange (up to 848Kbits per second), enabling more complex security information to be passed between an RFID card and reader without affecting the user's experience by causing unnecessary delays. Read ranges for products based on the ISO/IEC 14443 platform are also limited to 4 centimetres (about 1.5"), providing added security.
According to TI, the December 2004 Nilson Report indicates that payment card manufacturers shipped some 4.38 billion units to card issuers (Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Diners Club, Discover, JCB, and ATM cards) and retailers (both credit and pre-paid cards) in 2003. And, according to a statement by MasterCard in mid-2004, MasterCard's customer financial institutions worldwide had issued more than 627.5 million MasterCard-branded cards in the first half of 2004 - a 6.6% increase over the same period in 2003.
Source: Texas Instruments Inc.
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