NFC Forum issues new technical specifications that widen tag support and enhance interoperability

The NFC Forum has published one adopted and three candidate technical specifications, offering new capabilities that support improved RF communication, new and legacy tag support, NFC-V technology and active communication mode, which balances power consumption and enhances link stability during peer-to-peer communications.

NFC Forum“On one side, we have the three candidate specifications for Analog, Activity and Digital Protocol,” Jürgen Böhler, NFC Forum technical committee vice chair, told NFC World. “These are existing specifications that are now being released in version 2.0.

“This new release of these three specifications introduces Active Communication Mode for peer-to-peer communication between two NFC devices and introduces NFC-V technology which allows NFC devices to communicate with tags which are based on ISO/IEC 15693 technology.

“We have additionally released the Type 5 Tag Operation Specification which describes tags that use ISO/IEC 15693 technology, how NDEF messages can be stored on these tags, and how the data structures must be organised on the tags so that they can be read by NFC devices just like they read type 1 to 4 tags.”

The newly adopted specification is the “NFC Forum Type 5 Tag Operation Technical Specification”, while the three candidates specifications are “NFC Analog Candidate Technical Specification Version 2.0”, “NFC Activity Candidate Technical Specification Version 2.0” and “NFC Digital Protocol Candidate Technical Specification Version 2.0”.

The NFC Forum released a candidate specification that extended the functionality of NFC devices to include formal support for Type V technology in June 2015. The new specifications can be downloaded from the NFC Forum website.

UPDATE The NFC Forum has asked us to point out the following: “Unlike other RF implementations based on ISO/IEC 15693, the NFC Forum’s implementation of NFC-V technology is not designed for long range communication. This is because the NFC Forum’s support for NFC-V operates only in high-speed communication mode and 100% modulation index, which reduces the reading distance. It is also because NFC devices are built to operate only within a distance of a few centimeters, thereby delivering a consistent user experience.”

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