STMicroelectronics and Fujitsu develop contactless smart card IC

Oct. 30, 2002–GENEVA and TOKYO–STMicroelectronics and Fujitsu Ltd. have teamed up to develop the ST19ZR01, a contactless smart card IC with FRAM and ROM, but no standard RAM. A demonstrator product, which includes an on-board library of certified cryptographic algorithms, will be marketed through ST starting 4Q02. The newly developed product will be used in applications like transport ticketing and personal ID cards.

The ST19ZR01 contains the characteristics of ST’s ST19 platform, certified under the recently developed ISO15408 standard (also known as the Common Criteria). These include a hardware DES accelerator for fast cryptographic operations and built-in security firewalls for the on-chip memories and DES accelerator, the companies said. In addition, the ST19ZR01 is fully compliant with the ISO 14443 Type B contactless standard, offering a data transfer capability up to 424Kbps.

The ST19ZR01 incorporates 1.5KBytes of FRAM memory, which also provides very high data retention reliability in excess of 10 years, according to the companies. FRAM technology has very fast read and write times (less than 200nsec) and extremely low standby current (a few microamps), thereby achieving lower power consumption and faster write times than the traditional EEPROM technology, ST and Fujitsu said.

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