1998-04-27 , E/IC-1016/39

Philips Semiconductors is the world's first company to succeed in offering a fully working true dual interface smart card IC with a triple-DES coprocessor - MIFARE^® PRO - together with the essential development tools.

Launched by Philips Semiconductors in October 1997, the MIFARE^® PRO dual interface IC family fully supports both contact and contactless smart card transactions on a single chip, ensuring high security and convenience for users. In February this year, MIFARE^® PRO was demonstrated at Smart Card '98, a major international smart card exhibition, where it raised considerable interest in the smart card industry. Today's announcement is further evidence of the company's commitment to MIFARE^® PRO as the world's leading dual interface technology.

Philips Semiconductors' MIFARE^® Architecture Platform, covers 90% of the contactless smart card market; with more than 30 million card ICs in use worldwide and over a billion transactions carried out over the last three years. Significant interest in MIFARE^® PRO has been generated by potential partnerships between the banking and public transport sectors, where the ability to process rapidly contact and contactless applications, in a secure environment, is vital.

The MIFARE^® platform enables banks to exploit the high transaction volumes generated with contactless schemes in public transport to achieve the critical number of users needed for national electronic purse schemes, while ensuring high security standards. In turn, public transport service providers can securely load their application onto a bank's card, removing the need and expense of issuing their own card. In addition, both providers benefit from the ability of MIFARE^® PRO to be used on the existing contact and contactless MIFARE^® reader infrastructure.

MIFARE^® PRO is a microcontroller card with innovative and high performance features, including a high-speed triple-DES co-processor, capable of performing calculations more than 400 times faster than today's software solutions. This fast co-processor makes MIFARE^® PRO a true dual interface card IC and is essential to meet the high speeds demanded by contactless operations. In addition, the MIFARE^® PRO features and functionality are available on both contact and contactless interfaces without technical constraints. The contactless interface technology is fully compatible with the widely installed and accepted MIFARE^® technology complying with the emerging ISO 14443 type A standard, while the contact interface complies with ISO 7816.

Developing applications for smart cards requires thorough testing before the code is fixed in ROM, to ensure the accuracy, security and reliability of the card program and the application. Philips Semiconductors, in partnership with Ashling Microsystems, now offers a complete set of development tools for MIFARE^® PRO dual interface cards, enabling efficient development of the card operating systems and applications.

Ashling's CTMF2D80 Development System provides full real-time in-circuit emulation, source-level debugging and software quality assurance tools for rapid, secure and reliable development of MIFARE^® PRO card applications. The CTMF2D80 emulator allows real-time test and debugging of MIFARE^® PRO programs, and probes are available for ISO7816 or contactless card readers. Performance analysis and code coverage measurement are available as options.

Hosted under Windows™, Windows^® 95 or Windows™ NT, the PathFinder for Windows™ user-interface software for the CTMF2D80 emulator provides full source-level debugging for MIFARE^® PRO code development in either C or Assembler languages. All popular 80C51 compilers and assemblers are also supported.

In addition to the standard development tools, a card emulator is available. It is a new, compact and easy-to-use development tool for evaluating system performance of the card operating system in a real environment before the ROM code is fabricated. Designed specifically for MIFARE^® dual interface controllers, it can also be used for standard controllers.

Philips Semiconductors, a division of Philips Electronics NV, headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, is the ninth largest semiconductor supplier in the world. Philips Semiconductors is a leader with a proven reputation in the development and production of cryptocontroller and contactless smart card ICs. Philips Semiconductors' innovations in digital audio, video and mobile technology position the company as a leader in the consumer, multimedia and wireless communications markets. Sales offices are located in all major markets around the world and are supported by regional application labs. MIFARE^® is a registered trademark of Philips Electronics NV.

Founded in 1985, Ashling Microsystems is the world leader in development systems and performance analysis for smart card microcontrollers. Ashling's products and services are represented throughout the world through a network of technical distributors and offices in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Korea, Malaysia, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, United Kingdom and USA.