NXP Shares Product Roadmap and Application Know-How

Samples will likely ship at the beginning of 2011, and the company intends to ramp up volume production in the first quarter of that year.

"Customers have been requesting a dual-frequency IC," Elzinga explains. "We have customers already using our HF products—i.e., the I-code—in applications for product authentication. NFC modules are currently being deployed in mobile phones, and therefore, consumers can interact via RFID with the product. The combination of HF and UHF allows for the maximum benefits of RFID. Companies can use UHF when data needs to be managed over a longer distance in production control and supply chain. And with a retail shop or the home environment, low-cost 13.56 MHz readers can be used."

The chip will comply with the EPC Gen 2 UHF protocol and the ISO 18000-3 Mode 1 HF standard, established specifically for item-level applications (in contrast, Newsom says, the ISO 14443 and 15693 protocols were created for proximity and vicinity smart-card applications, respectively). Newsom and Elzinga envision the dual-frequency chips will be incorporated in tags that companies will utilize for product authentication and supply chain management, and that consumers will read the tags by means of NFC-enabled devices, such as cell phones, supporting the ISO 18000-3 Mode 1 standard. NXP expects that the dual-frequency tag will be used in applications at an item level for product authentication or functionality that will enhance consumer experiences with brands.

The dual-frequency chip is not meant to be used in ultra-low-cost tags, Elzinga says, as it will likely include a large amount of user memory—enough to encode product data, authentication or consumer information. But the additional expense of adding components to the chip to support communication using a second frequency, he notes, is not significant. "In some applications," Elzinga says, "where the HF infrastructure is installed or consumers want to use their NFC phone for product authentication, a dual-frequency tag will be required," because companies will also want to employ the UHF band to read that same tag when that item is making its way through the supply chain.

NXP continues to enhance the features of its Mifare chips, which the company claims are the most widely used RFID chip in the world, with more than 1 billion units sold to date. One growing market for Mifare is transportation ticketing. "There are some issues in the transportation market, such as privacy and the sharing of data," says Martin Gruber, NXP's marketing director for automatic fare collection. "If you have trains, buses and others using e-tickets, who acts as a clearinghouse for the data so people can use the tickets nationwide? We're actively working on ways to address these issues at the chip level."

Another big market for RFID chips is electronic passports. NXP estimates that only 250 million of the 1 billion passports currently in circulation contain RFID transponders (of which 80 percent use NXP chips), so new passports and ongoing replacements will remain an important business.