NXP and Gemalto sign licensing agreement for adding MIFARE to UICC cards

AMSTERDAM & EINDHOVEN, THE NETHERLANDS: NXP Semiconductors N.V. and Gemalto, the world leader in digital security, announced a global strategic licensing agreement for NXP’s MIFARE™ technology, enabling Gemalto to integrate MIFARE into its UICC cards.

This cooperation aims at spurring the usage of NFC mobile devices in the MIFARE infrastructure, therefore accelerating worldwide deployments of mobile contactless services.

The agreement enables Gemalto to complement its existing NFC application portfolio with MIFARE DESFire and MIFARE Plus technology for its UICC security solutions. As a result, mobile operators and service providers will be able to offer a broad range of mobile contactless services thanks to the widened availability of UICC cards incorporating MIFARE.

This is the most widespread contactless technology worldwide and provides high levels of performance, flexibility and security in public transportation, access management, event ticketing and customer loyalty programs.

“MIFARE is already at the heart of contactless infrastructures around the world,” said Henri Ardevol, vice president and general manager, secure transactions, NXP Semiconductors. “We are proud to collaborate with Gemalto to offer the convenience of this technology to a new target of 5 billion mobile phone users.”

“Adding the MIFARE capability to Gemalto’s NFC application portfolio is key for the mass deployment of mobile contactless,” added Rémi de Fouchier, senior vice president, Trusted Services Management, Gemalto. “We are enthused that more and more consumers around the world will enjoy the simplicity and convenience of waving their mobile phone for couponing and stored value payment and transport services.”

This expansion of the MIFARE licensing program further underscores the leadership of this technology as an open architecture platform for end-to-end solutions in both smart cards and smart devices such as mobile phones.

In addition to this latest license for SIM cards, NXP has licensed MIFARE technology to various chip manufacturers, while hundreds of manufacturers supply MIFARE reader terminals and smart cards.