NFC: More Than Just Mobile Payments
When it comes to NFC (Near Field Communication), people immediately think of mobile payments. Indeed, after NFC is combined with mobile phones, it can be used as a contactless smart card, smart card reader terminal, and M2M data transmission link. In this way, the mobile phone has a payment function, which is extremely convenient whether it is used for payment and ticket purchase, or for electronic tickets. Gartner's survey results show that the global mobile payment transaction scale is estimated to grow from $171.5 billion in 2012 to $617 billion in 2016. Among them, NFC technology will play an important role. Due to the natural security of near-field communication, in addition to mutual communication and certain computing functions, NFC chips can also introduce encryption functions. Therefore, NFC technology has quickly found its own application scenarios in mobile payment, and mobile payment has made it shine. At the same time, this technology is penetrating into a wider field.
From a technical point of view, NFC is a short-range high-frequency wireless communication technology that allows electronic devices to perform contactless point-to-point data transmission and exchange within ten centimeters. It evolved from RFID and is backward compatible with RFID. Like RFID, NFC information is also transmitted by electromagnetic inductive coupling in the radio frequency part of the spectrum, but there is still a big difference between the two. The transmission range of NFC is smaller than that of RFID, but due to the unique signal attenuation technology, compared with RFID, the distance is shorter, the bandwidth is higher, and the energy consumption is lower. It is compatible with the existing contactless smart card technology and has been strongly supported by the industry and has become a standard. Therefore, in terms of technical attributes, compared with other short-range wireless connection methods, NFC is a private communication method and has natural application advantages in mobile payment, access control, public transportation, and other fields. If the mobile phone has a built-in NFC chip, it increases the function of two-way data transmission compared with RFID, which is only used as a tag. More importantly, mutual authentication and dynamic encryption can be implemented on NFC.
Although mobile payments gave birth to NFC, looking to the future, the former is only one of its applications. Due to both privacy and two-way transmission, the industry has continuously expanded the application space of NFC. For example, when NFC phones are in close proximity, files, and other content can be transferred between phones. This feature is useful in places where collaboration is required, such as when sharing files or when multiple players are playing a game. At present, many terminal manufacturers have launched NFC-enabled mobile phones, and some NFC-based mobile games have also emerged.
With the diversification of NFC applications, more and more consumer electronic products have begun to introduce this technology, including televisions, remote controls, and game consoles. Various NFC technology application products have also appeared one after another, such as Sony's first waterproof smartwatch with NFC function. Chip maker Broadcom is optimistic that there will be more than 3.5 billion NFC-enabled devices in the next five years. Maybe in the near future, we can use NFC-enabled smartphones and smart TVs to communicate with each other at home and transfer the video from the mobile phone to the TV screen for playback.
