Feature: Evalboards


The goal of universal interoperability is at the heart of the EMVCo standard’s mission, and it has very successfully achieved its aim


Easing the design of NFC radio circuits


By Gernot Hehn, Applications Engineer, Panthronics


I


ndustry representative body UK Finance states that in January 2020, in the UK alone there were some 878 million contactless-card transactions, mostly over Near-Field Communications (NFC) RF interfaces. Tis makes the technology the most widely used today, further buoyed by its reliability in point-of-sale (PoS) terminals.


Tere is a good technical reason for its reliability – the rigorous


specification and universal application of the payment industry’s EMVCo standard, which sets strict specifications for the RF interface, protocol layer operations, and payment application soſtware embedded in contactless-cards/user-devices and payment


20 June 2021 www.electronicsworld.co.uk


Figure 1: The square-wave architecture of conventional NFC controllers (top), and the sine-wave architecture of the PTX100R (bottom). The Panthronics sine-wave architecture requires only a few antenna- matching components and no EMC filter


terminals. In addition, EMVCo’s rigorous rules apply to the compliance testing of all products using NFC RF interfaces. Te goal of universal interoperability is at the heart of the standard’s mission, and it has very successfully achieved its aim. While this is good for consumers, it makes terminal design for


compliance challenging, made even tougher by current version 3.0 of the EMVCo standard, which sets even stricter criteria for RF operation; version 3.1 is under development, with stricter rules still. Tis is why manufacturers of NFC transceiver ICs compete to provide the best resources to help terminal manufacturers achieve design success in the shortest possible time.


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