French researcher CEA-Leti announced that it has demonstrated a contactless, high-speed interface for smart cards. Leti has created a prototype of a complete phase modulation system, a reader and a card, that now achieves speeds of 6.8 Mbit/s. Phase modulation’s spectral characteristics are superior to those of amplitude modulation, allowing considerably higher speeds than the current limit of 848 Kbit/s.
Leti’s current work on optimization of signal processing aims to attain speeds greater than 10 Mbit/s. Leti is also holding discussions with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), in partnership with Gemalto, to take full advantage of this work.
The very high-speed contactless interface is the fruit of research that Leti has carried out since 2003 and Leti’s work on the MEDEA+Onom@topic project. That project, which ended in 2009, involved 16 European companies and research organizations developing a set of international standards related to e-identity and mobile transactions and to demonstrate concrete implementation of these standards. At the heart of the project were advanced prototypes for a new generation of e-ID cards or SIM devices. ![[end]](/resources/bullet/contactlessnews-4.gif)
