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MARCH 18, 2004
Like It or Not, RFID Is Coming [Page 2 of 2] Q: About your work with Visa: What's wrong with the credit cards now in use? A: First, RFID offers increased convenience by letting you simply touch something with your card to facilitate a transaction instead of having to swipe the card through a magnetic reader. I'm constantly frustrated when I put a credit card into a reader and the stripe doesn't read or is demagnetized. Plus, contactless payments are cool -- and Visa, when it implements them, will be able to give customers a higher-end, interesting product. Secondly, if you use magnetic-strip technology, you have to make the strip a certain size and shape for it to work -- it pretty much defines the size of a credit card. With RFID, you have complete freedom on the size and shape of the credit card. You can make it small, the size of a coin, something that fits on your key chain, something that's embedded into your cell phone. That's convenience. Q: So what would the ultimate shape and size of the credit card be? A: It's very simple: Credit cards go away in the future, and your phone becomes your credit card. In fact, most of the contents of your wallet go away. Because, if you look at all the cards you carry today, there's no reason you can't have that information secure and separate, stored as part of an RFID tag embedded in your cell phone. RFID could replace your keys, too. Most car manufacturers we're talking to will have a card you keep in your wallet or embedded into your cell phone. You get in your car, push start, and the reader in the car will read the card in your phone to make sure you're the car's owner. Or all this information could be embedded into RFID cards on your key chain or in your jewelry. Then, it would give you secure authentication and look nice. This evolution will be slow -- 10 years or 20 years, but you're already starting to see some of it today. Q: It sounds like RFID will compete, in certain applications, with wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) and Ultra-Wideband (UWB) A: All of these technologies will be used for different applications, because they're different. Wi-Fi and UWB have very high data rates. They can transmit an entire book in seconds. RFID's speeds are very much slower [NFC is capable of transferring about a megabit per second vs. 100 megabits per second for some kinds of Wi-Fi], and the chip can store only, perhaps, a page of information at a time. You could, potentially, use RFID to transfer an MP3 file onto your phone -- but not a movie or a PowerPoint presentation. You would use Wi-Fi or UWB for that. But RFID tags have inherent advantages. Chips that we make, for example, don't require a battery, and that makes them very portable. So when you see a movie trailer on your phone, you might buy movie tickets online and store the code that you must present at the theater as proof of purchase on your RFID tag. Q: So I could use my RFID tag for data storage? A: Exactly. For example, I might have a business card with an RF tag. If you put your phone, which has an RFID reader and tag, next to one of my business cards, you would instantly pick up the information from my business card (which also contains an RFID tag). I could also have my business card be my phone. We could put our phones together and exchange our information. It's an intuitive thing to do. Our RF tags would allow users to store this information on the tags themselves or on their phones' flash memory -- the predominant type of storage on cell phones today. Q: A lot of companies want to play in the RFID market. These chips are relatively simple. How do you differentiate your chips from those of other companies'? A: At the low end, the primary differentiator is price. At the high end, it's more about features, such as security, encryption, protection from evildoers. Q: What kind of things do people do to break into RFID chips -- and how do you prevent that? A: They put them in cold liquids, bombard them with gamma rays, do what's called differential power analysis. Basically, they've noticed that the chip uses a slightly different amount of power if you get an incorrect digit than if you get a correct digit, and they try to break the code that way. They take the chip apart and try to discover the password on the logic components. To counter that, we use temperature sensors and radiation sensors on our chips. We have all kinds of voltage protection, so they can't monkey around with that. The logic is randomly distributed. We have coding on the chip that's licensed from the CIA that's really hard to scrape off without permanently damaging the chip. We're the only company that can do high-level, triple DES encryption in a contactless RFID tag.
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