MIFARE: SMALL CHIP CHANGED THE WORLD OF AUTO FARE COLLECTION

MIFARE is a Semiconductor under the trademark NXP Semiconductors which are a array of chips commonly used in contactless smart cards and other proximity cards. The trademark of this technology is owned and registered by NXP Semiconductors (divided from Philips Electronics in the year 2006), it has its headquarters in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and its basic business sites are available in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, Hamburg, and Germany. MIFARE technology is accepted for most of the contactless smart card works all over the globe and thus, it is seen as the most successful platform in the world of automatic fare collection. Additionally, its luring and persuasive product mix includes the best solutions for other applications like loyalty, road tolling (toll tax), access management and gaming (fun cards for games like ice hockey).
The name of Mifare cards has come from the phrase MIkron Fare Collection System , which is available in various kinds of contactless cards: 1. MIFARE Ultralight: which was introduced in 2001 2. MIFARE Ultralight C: which was introduced in 2008 3. MIFARE Classic: which was introduced in 1994 4. MIFARE Plus: which was introduced in 2008 5. MIFARE DESFire: which was introduced in 2002 6. SmartMX: 7. MIFARE DESFire EV1: which was introduced in 2006 8. MIFARE SAM AV2: which was introduced in 2010 9.
Origin of MIFARE Mikron developed this system called MIFARE; therefore, the name stands for MIkron FARE-collection System. In the year 1998, it was acquired by Philips Company. After which, Hitachi went into contract for the license of MIFARE with Philips for introducing and to develop the solutions for contactless smart card for NTT’s IC telephone card, which started in the year1999 and ended in the year 2006. Motorola also tried hard to develop a series of chips like MIFARE for their wired-logic model but at last they had no option except giving up. Afterwards, 3 parties joined in the project of NTT contactless IC telephone card; namely: Tokin-Tamura-Siemens, Hitachi (under Philips contract for the technical support), and Denso (a Motorola s only product).initially, NTT demanded for 2 versions of the chip, i.e. first is a wired-logic chip (similar to MIFARE Classic) having very little memory but large memory capacity. Hitachi used to develop only large memory versions and left parts of the memory to actually fit for the versions of small memory. NXP developed and licensed MIFARE Plus and MIFARE DESFire to Renesas Technology in the year 2008. And in the year 2010, NXP technologies developed and licensed MIFARE to Gemalto. In the year 2011, NXP technologies developed and licensed Oberthur to make use of MIFARE in SIM cards. All these licensees had been developing Near Field Communication products also.