Revolutionizing Smart Tagging in IoT Applications with Integrated NFC Technology in Entry-Level MCUs

Near Field Communications (NFC) technology isn’t exactly a household word, even though the wireless technology is incorporated in more than 1.5 billion smartphones,forms the basis of secure wireless point-of-sale payment systems, and is projected to become a $20 billion market by 2020 and more than twice that by 2024**. This massive growth will come not only from current applications but from hundreds of others yet to be explored.However, this won’t occur unless manufacturers and designers fully understand how the unique attributes of NFC can benefit their products, and it’s also essential that incorporating NFC be as simple as possible. For example, it just makes sense that NFC functionality should be integrated within components such as micro-controllers, as they complement each other. NXP has taken a step toward this today with the LPC8N04 MCU, the first broad-market micro-controller to integrate an NFC tag interface within its package.NFC was designed to be versatile as it can operate in three modes: card emulation, reader/writer, and peer-to-peer. Card emulation makes NFC-enabled devices such as smartphones act like smart cards, reader/writer mode lets NFC-enabled devices read information stored on tags, and NFC peer-to-peer allows two NFC-enabled devices to exchange information.