Renesas Expands Licensing Agreement with NXP, Gains Access to MIFARE Portfolio

NXP, a European-based semiconductor company founded by Philips (News - Alert), and Renesas Technology Corp., a provider of microcontrollers, jointly announced an extended licensing agreement for NXP's MIFARE contactless technology.

 

This expanded licensing agreement will enable Renesas to have access to NXP's entire MIFARE product portfolio and will also help fortify Renesas' market position in the secure multipoint control unit (MCU) market for high-end mobile and dual-interface banking applications.

 

The main goal of the MIFARE license agreement is to drive the deployment and availability of advanced contactless infrastructures. Increased emergence of new and advanced over-the-air mobile phone services based on near field communication (NFC), such as electronic ticketing and payment, can now be anticipated. This will offer consumers with convenient and user-friendly connected services. Mobile network operators can simultaneously increase average revenue per user.

 

MIFARE is an interface platform that offers a full range of compatible contactless smart card integrated circuits (ICs), reader ICs, and dual-interface ICs that provide a link between the contactless and contact card markets. The MIFARE family of products offers enhanced performance, flexibility and security in the automatic fare collection, access management, event ticketing and customer loyalty markets. This industry standard is fully compliant with ISO 14443A, where ISO/IEC (News - Alert) 14443A is one of a series of international standards that explains the parameters under the general title identification cards — contactless integrated circuit cards — proximity cards.

 

"NXP's MIFARE technology has been hugely successful for contactless application deployments around the world, and the expansion of the MIFARE license agreement ensures that Renesas enhances the secure contactless product portfolio," said Yasushi Akao, board director and executive general manager of the MCU business group at Renesas, in a statement. "The agreement with NXP is enabling us to cater the further emergence of the worldwide contactless ecosystem especially focusing on advanced applications for payment and mobile devices."

 

Renesas has further plans to offer a complete range of security products with MIFARE, in order to meet the requirements of mobile and contactless payment industries across the globe.

 

Renesas Technology (News - Alert) provides semiconductor system solutions for mobile, automotive and PC/AV markets. It also provides LCD driver ICs, smart card microcontrollers, RF-ICs, high power amplifiers (HPAs), mixed signal ICs, system-on-chip (SoC), system-in-package (SiP) and more. 

 

NXP provides semiconductors, system solutions and software for - TVs, set-top boxes, identification applications, mobile phones, cars and a wide range of other electronic devices.