Smart cards break out of traditional roles as chips advance

摘要

Paris ― The curtain will go up on the second act for smart cards and related chips at the Cartes 2003 conference here this week. Technologies will be shown that go beyond the traditional roles in credit cards and European GSM phone security cards in a bid to take the technology global for a raft of everyday items. Emerging applications include mass-transit cards in China, tiny consumer mass-storage devices for music and video downloads in Japan and South Korea, national ID cards, driver's licenses valid across the European Union and next- generation passports and visas that store bio-metric data. The U.S. government is pressuring 26 visa-waiver nations to embed biometric data in their passports. The mobile-communications sector remains the largest market for smart-card chips today, with SIM secure ID cards―mandatory for GSM mobile phones in Europe but not used in the United States―taking a large share of the controllers. But that market isn't growing, and controller prices there are falling, said Derrick Robinson, senior analyst at IMS Research (Wellingborough,U.K.).