TI has announced its first NFC product, an NFC transceiver that supports peer-to-peer communications and card emulation as well as read/write functionality and is designed to be built into a wide range of industrial, commercial and consumer products.
Semiconductor maker Texas Instruments (TI) has introduced an NFC IC which, the company says, is the industry’s lowest power contactless short-range communication transceiver.
The new TRF7970A builds on TI’s existing RFID product range to include support for peer-to-peer communication and card emulation in addition to reader/writer capability.
“Peer-to-peer communication continues to increase in popularity in applications including medical equipment, secure pairing and payments,” says TI. “This allows users to more easily take advantage of continuously evolving features and apps. For example, NFC devices can configure Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technology sessions between devices without consumer interaction, share and interact with feature- and content- rich data such as coupons at point of sale, and allow consumer devices to easily exchange files and contacts.”
A development kit can be ordered direct from TI’s website. The TRF7970AEVM NFC kit costs US$99 and is available for immediate dispatch.
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Thanks for this article. I come to discover lately many people do not know what NFC is or the difference between RFID and confused since both runs on 13.56Khz(?).
The big differential for NFC is that NFC is a “transceiver” that is described in this article that TI is bringing to the market. NFC not only can read RFID tags, it can emulate a RFID tag – that is the key factor many of the people who don’t know the difference between NFC and RFID.
This device TI released is important especially for incorporation into non-telco based mobile devices for payment applications. The thing I like about transceivers is that we can create a “dynamic tag identifier” on the fly that can serve as a unique payment token specific to a vendor/payee/transaction making NFC more secure. This cannot be done with plain RFID stickers on a mobile phone.