Major shipment milestone for NXP's SmartMX security chip

SINGAPORE: NXP Semiconductors today announced that its Identification Business has reached a major milestone, having shipped over 500 million SmartMX security chips.

Since the product launched in 2001, NXP’s SmartMX chips have been incorporated into a wide variety of contact and contactless applications which require strong layers of security at the hardware and software level, including payment and bank cards, access management schemes, mass transit infrastructures, device authentication and eGovernment solutions such as ePassports, driver licenses, national ID and health cards.

"SmartMX has been selected and widely deployed in a high number of security sensitive applications around the world,” said John Devlin, research director, IMS Research. “The product has been trusted for use in both commercial and government environments where identification, payment, access and data protection tasks need to be reliably and securely performed."

“Regardless of the end application, NXP’s SmartMX platform of security chips has enabled a wide range of solutions for identifying people, managing access rights and enabling secure transactions in our customers security systems,” said Guenter Schlatte, vice president and general manager, eGovernment & banking at NXP Semiconductors.

“We are committed to continually evolving our range of security products, and are currently working on the next generation of the SmartMX product family to introduce new benchmarks in transaction speed, contactless performance and security while further reducing chip sizes and product cost.”

Within the ePassport market alone, NXP is currently involved in more than 80 percent of all ePassports schemes worldwide, having shipped over 150 million SmartMX chips to 68 out of 79 countries including the US, France and more recently China.

In the finance industry, leading players such as MasterCard are also using NXP’s SmartMX security chip to power fast and secure contactless payments. Further outstanding SmartMX design wins include the nationwide electronic transport ticketing infrastructure in Germany, smart metering schemes and PayTV conditional access cards including mobile TV.