Infineon Enhances User Experience for Contactless Payments

Infineon Technologies sets another milestone in smart card innovation. Its new 40nm generation of security chip solutions – the SLC3x – is based on a design concept that provides outstanding performance and scalability for a vast array of smart card applications and beyond.

Smart card manufacturers and payment solution providers will benefit from a family architecture based on the de-facto industry standard ARM, Infineon’s contactless excellence as well as innovative logistic concepts.

Supporting payment, identification and other applications, smart card solutions are increasingly transitioning to contactless, multifunctional technologies.

They often also incorporate new biometric features to further facilitate user identification and make for a more convenient user experience. However, these new features and capabilities involve multiple stakeholders, adding implementation complexity and security challenges to the designs.

“The road to success lies in chip technologies that meet evolving security, flexibility and performance needs”, said Ioannis Kabitoglou, Vice President Smart Card Solutions at Infineon. “Infineon’s 40nm platform combines the best of all worlds with its 32-bit ARM CPU, SOLID Flash memory and best-in-class contactless performance. Our customers will be able to better master market challenges and to offer innovative solutions for both payment and identification.”

Outstanding contactless products based on ARM core architecture

Infineon’s SLC3x series is the industry’s most advanced security controller portfolio. Right-fit members of the series support the full application spectrum, ranging from low-cost contact-based pre-paid and loyalty cards through standard dual-interface payment and identity cards to biometric system-on-card solutions and wearable devices – all compliant with the latest EMVCo specifications.

All SLC3x products are based on a high-performance, powerful and energy-efficient 32-bit ARM  SecurCore SC300 dual-interface security cryptocontroller. This isenhanced by Infineon’s unique digital security technology as well as third-generation SOLID FLASH technology – of which more than seven billion chips have been sold to date. Combining these technologies with full coverage of contactless protocols, makes this family unique in the market.

Transaction speed and robust packaging are key success factors for contactless applications such as identification and transport ticketing, delivered through form factors such as wearables like key fobs and rings or through cards with biometric user authentication. With the SLC3x product family, Infineon enables contactless payment transaction times below 200 milliseconds even in scenarios with low reader field strengths or in combination with small antenna designs.

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