1998-12-10 , E/IC-1054/39
Product News From Philips Semiconductors

Philips Semiconductors announced today that the world's first true dual interface card IC with a hardware triple-DES coprocessor - MIFARE® PRO - is being released for volume production. First projects are underway, while all major card manufacturers are working on software design-ins with MIFARE® PRO development tools.

The MIFARE® PRO dual interface IC family is ideally suited to combining banking and transport applications on a single card. Service providers are safe in the knowledge that this card IC supports recently defined application standards developed by major banking institutes - ensuring high security and convenience for service providers and card users alike. It is also fully compatible with the existing contactless MIFARE® infrastructure, which eliminates additional adaptation costs necessary with other types of dual interface cards.

MIFARE® PRO is the ideal contactless technology for banks, transport operators and other service providers to offer their services together on one card. Banks benefit from the high transaction volumes generated with contactless MIFARE® schemes in public transport. This means banks easily achieve the critical mass of users needed for large scale acceptance of national electronic purse schemes. In turn, public transport operators and other service providers can securely load their application onto a bank card, removing the need and expense of issuing their own card, while ensuring the high speeds required in contactless transactions.

The high level of security of MIFARE® PRO has been achieved with sophisticated safety measures including a fully automated design technique called glue logic design. Glue logic ensures that it is virtually impossible to tap into the card's information by finding signals or nodes to physically attack the IC. While the hardware-embedded triple DES co-processor meets the latest requirements for protection against enhanced analysis techniques.

Convenience is provided with the proven and widely established contactless MIFARE® technology. With over 30 million card ICs in use worldwide in transport and other applications and over a billion transactions carried out over the last three years, the MIFARE® Architecture Platform not only corresponds to the emerging ISO 14443, type A, but has become the industry standard for contactless smart cards. With MIFARE®, Philips Semiconductors demonstrates that the chosen RF technology (100% ASK modulation and Millercoding) is a well proven and secure method for contactless data transmission with higher reliability and speed, allowing cost efficient implementation on silicon.

MIFARE® PRO is a  80C51 smart card microcontroller with innovative and high performance features, including a high-speed triple-DES co-processor, capable of performing calculations up to 400 times faster than today's software solutions. With the low power design, this co-processor maintains the high calculation speed independent of the required operating distance, which is essential to meet the high speeds demanded by contactless operations.

The MIFARE® PRO features and functionality are available on both contact and contactless interfaces without technical constraints. The contactless interface unit (CIU) of MIFARE® PRO fully supports the MIFARE® RF interface technology. Features, such as anticollision (simultaneous operation of more then one card), cyclic redundancy checking (CRC) and generation or parity checking are supported by the hardware. This means the additional software required for contactless communication is kept simple for the developer of the operating system.

A complete set of development tools is available from Ashling and these are compatible with the development platform used for all other Philips smart card controller ICs. In addition Philips provides software support to implement the RF-protocol.

Philips Semiconductors, a division of Royal Philips Electronics, 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 as well as in components for radio frequency identification. 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.