Innovision, the UK NFC (near field comms) start-up, solves one of the worst problems in consumer electronics, how to effect wireless pairings, the IET/GSA Semiconductor Forum in London was told yesterday.

"The Bluetooth guys have not made it easy to pair devices", Dave Wollen, CEO of Innovision, told delegates, "but NFC can provide the pairing just by touching phones. NFC makes existing consumer products very easy to use."

Innovision is unique among NFC suppliers in that it is an IP (intellectual property) provider rather than an IC provider. Other players, like NXP, provide the chip. Innovision provides the IP to be incorporated in an ASIC.

"You can put our IP on Bluetooth chips, WiFi chips, GPS chips and power chips", said Wollen.

Wollen came up with a load of interesting applications. For instance:

• A phone could be used to touch a printer and get a print-out of data contained in the phone.
• Another possible application is the 'Touch Poster' where you touch your phone to a destination on a poster at the bus station and details of the next journey to that destination are sent to your handset.
• Another one is to use NFC as a means of checking on the authenticity of luxury goods to see if they are counterfeit versions.

NFC communication operates at 106kbps, 212kbps and 424kbps in the 13.56MHz unlicensed band. It is a peer to peer technology which allows a device containing it to act in three modes:

• As a smart card e.g. an Oyster card for making payments
• As a reader/writer which is able to read a tag or write a tag and, third,
• As a means of transferring small amounts of data.

According to Wollen, Nokia is putting NFC into its 6212 3G handset due in Q3. "There are a lot of NFC-enabled phones out there", said Wollen, "especially in Japan. 3i says half of all handsets will be NFC-enabled by 2010 and ABI Research says 500m handsets will have NFC by 2011.

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