ARM Community: Secure Transactions Using NFC and LPC Microcontrollers - ARM Community

Near Field Communications (NFC) is becoming more pervasive in our society, driven in large part by NFC chips inclusion on many Android phones. As consumers become more aware of NFC technology, demand for NFC features on a variety of other applications increases. Ticketing, security access, loyalty cards and closed-loop micro systems are just a few examples of applications that are adopting NFC technology.

NXP is the world leader in Near Field Communications, with a full portfolio of secure microcontrollers and a strong innovation pipeline. 1.2 Billion people live in urban areas where NXP’s contactless ticketing solutions make public transit more convenient and efficient, and 200M+ people rely on NXP technology to enter their offices and hotels every day.

In order to help our customers implement NFC in their applications, NXP offers design examples on 3 different ARM® Cortex™-M cores. These 3 examples share a common design “backbone” made up of a contact and/or contactless card reader communicating over a serial port to an ARM microcontroller, which either drives a touchscreen LCD panel for user interface or talks to a PC-based back-end system via UART or Ethernet.

The first design example uses an NXP LPC4088 ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller to implement a Point-of-Sale (POS) application in a coffee shop. The LPC4088 directly drives a 7” LCD touchscreen panel and loads images from SPI Flash through the unique NXP SPI Flash Interface (SPIFI) peripheral, while also communicating with an NXP CLRC663 card reader IC. The free software provided with this application can also be easily adapted to the pin-compatible LPC1788 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller as well.

The second design example implements an EMV (Europay, Mastercard, Visa) compliant POS application using an NXP LPC1768 ARM Cortex-M3 microcontroller. The LPC1768 again interfaces with a CLRC663 card reader IC, but in this application, the touchscreen panel is an SPI-based controller.

Finally, a 3^rd example using an LPC11U24 ARM Cortex-M0 microcontroller talking to a PC-based system is available from NXP. This USB-based card reader uses the on-chip Smart Card UART (ISO7816) to communicate with NXP’s TDA8035 contact card reader and SPI to interface with the CLRC663 contactless card reader, with the on-chip USB feeding the information to the USB host.

NXP has put all of these Secure Transactions designs, along with a webinar and demonstration videos on a dedicated website. This site provides links to the free software examples as well as information on how to obtain the hardware. By offering design examples with different user interfaces, contact and contactless cards, and different ARM Cortex-M cores, design engineers have the flexibility to choose the right NFC solution for their application and the tools to implement the solution quickly and easily.

Check out the full variety of NXP solutions based on ARM Cortex microcontrollers at this week’s ARM TechCon in our sponsored sessions and live demos at booth #713.

Guest Partner Blogger:

Gene Carter, International Product Marketing Manager, NXP Semiconductors. Gene has over 17 years experience in the semiconductors industry. He holds a BSEE from Tufts University and an MBA from USC’s Marshall School of Business.

ARM welcomes its wealth of Partners in the ARM Connected Community (CC) to submit guest blogs to be published on our multiple community blogs. If interested in participating please submit email inquiries to Tell.Us@arm.com.

The ARM Connected Community (CC) is an extensive ecosystem covering all aspects of ARM processor-based design, from chip implementation through to system and device design. The CC provides a platform for collaborative innovation, with multiple types of forums for members to work with one another, and with customers, to solve industry challenges, all with the purpose of enabling designers to focus on differentiating features and an accelerated time-to-market for ARM powered solutions.