Discovering the NFC Air Interface
Michael Gebhart
NXP Semiconductors, Austria
Abstract
Invented 2002 by Sony and Philips, commercial success started in 2012, with 130 million NFC interfaces in Smartphones and Mobiles in the market. Today, almost everybody owns his personal contactless near-field communication interface, which is enabling personal authentication for what we may call secure applications like payment, access, e-Government or Health, including access to Contactless Card technologies. Near-field communication is physically different to conventional wireless UHF communication: It combines power transmission with a bi-directional data interface for distances of just up to a few centimetres. The technology specification covers a family of protocols used for most relevant Contactless Card systems. In this talk we discover specified modulation formats, data rates and antenna techniques in the context of the inductive coupling channel which is suffering from de-tuning and signal distortion. All these are challenges for engineering, which use the options of todays communication technologies up to the limit, but up to date were successfully mastered.
Biography
As RF System Expert Michael is part of the NXP Semiconductors development team since more than a decade, he serves as lecturer for RFID-Systems at TU Graz and as trainer for FH Campus 02. Besides chip development work and customer projects, Michael was active in Standardization for Contactless Communication as technical expert, contributing to ISO/IEC, EMVCo and NFC Forum. He coordinated a team to develop test benches for contactless chip characterization and served as technical expert in innovation fields like the Very High Bit Rate extension or for integrated NFC antennas and active load modulation. Born in 1971, Michael holds an MSc and PhD with honours in Electrical Engineering from Graz University of Technology. Over the years he played an active role at conferences, serving as Special Session Chair or in Technical Committees, he published more than 50 papers, holds 5 patents and is a co-author of „The RFID Handbook“.