Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Four new NFC specifications released

The NFC Forum released four new specifications aimed at the robustness and communications speed for Near Field Communication (NFC) devices, like smartphones.

  • Digital Protocol Technical Specification Version 2.2: This specification addresses the digital protocol for NFC-enabled device communication, providing an implementation specification on top of the ISO/IEC 18092 and ISO/IEC 14443 standards. The new specification adds error recovery for Type 2 and Type 5 Tags communication. This update improves the user experience by ensuring reliable NFC communication in difficult environments where NFC communications might be disturbed.
  • Type 2 Tag to Type 5 Tag Technical Specifications Version 1.1: Type 2 Tag to Type 5 Tag Specification Version 1.1 defines NFC-enabled devices in Reader/Writer Mode and detects, reads and writes an NFC Data Exchange Format message on NFC Forum Tags. The specification was updated to support time-optimized implementations to improve the performance for reading NFC Forum tags in support of the new TNEP protocol.
  • Activity Technical Specification Version 2.1 and Profiles Technical Specification Version 1.0: These specifications were created from Activity 2.0 by splitting it into two specifications to ease in the future maintenance of these specifications. The Profiles section of Activity 2.0 is now described in the Profiles 1.0 Technical Specification. It adds a new Profile to discover all services eventually offered with different technologies. The specification explains how the NFC Digital Protocol Specification can be used to set up the communication protocol with another NFC device or NFC Forum tag.

“We are constantly improving on the global specifications to improve the overall user experience for NFC users. NFC Forum members take this responsibility very seriously as their decisions impact the majority of smartphone users and many businesses,” said Mike McCamon, executive director, NFC Forum. “The specifications we are announcing today enhance the quality of NFC communications and allow users to exchange more data, faster in support of the rapid increase we are seeing in the use of TNEP.”