Samsung announces Secu-NFC Chip, combines NFC IC with Secure Element

Samsung announces Secu-NFC Chip, combines NFC IC with Secure Element

It’s a busy week at CARTES and Samsung just outed its new Secu-NFC Chip, which will no doubt cause some stirring within the industry.  The new Samsung Secu-NFC Chip combines an NFC controller and a secure element into one unit allowing various advantages over current ICs. The secure element is the storage area in an NFC phone where personal and sensitive data is securely stored. That storage area isn’t directly accessible through your NFC phone’s operating system and secure elements generally have tamper proof features that ensure the memory locks up if someone attempts to access personal information without proper authentication. What makes Samsung’s announcement notable is that their new SENHRN1, or Secu-NFC Chip, combines both the NFC chip and secure element into one efficient chip.

“Mobile payment, ticketing, data sharing, electronic ID card functions are some of the diverse user services enabled by NFC technology, which is becoming a key service enabler on emerging convergence technologies,” said Dojun Rhee, Vice President of System LSI Marketing, Device Solutions at Samsung Electronics. “Samsung’s new secure NFC solution with its high data storage capacity provides consumers with ample room to expand operation service and features to deliver the ultimate user experience.”

Not only does the new Secu-NFC Chip save valuable space within the phone for other components, it also has power saving features. The new Samsung Secu-NFC Chip also supports single-wire protocol so users can also take advantage of a separate U-SIM secure element at the same time, which could double the sensitive data that could be housed on a phone and allow for different service providers to access different secure elements through separate trusted service managers.

A great example of this would be if you had your access control to your car provisioned on one secure element and then had your Google Wallet provisioned on another. What we don’t know is whether the Secu-NFC Chip has the capability to support another embedded secure element within the phone itself, which would be more useful. NXP and Broadcom NFC ICs already have the ability to support multiple secure elements. Samsung’s new Secu-NFC Chip is a great step forward but there are still questions unanswered.

Samsung’s Secu-NFC Chip works even when your battery is drained

One of the big roadblocks and concerns of consumers has always been the question of what happens if I run out of battery power and need to make a purchase? Samsung has answered this concern with its new SENHRN1 Secu-NFC Chip, which has a “enhanced battery-off” feature that allows payments to happen even when your battery is fully discharged. Another interesting fact about Samsung’s new Secu-NFC Chip is that it is no bigger than normal standalone NFC chips measuring in at 4.3mm X 4.3mm X 1.0mm.

So, NFC Chips have now evolved to the stage of system-in-package, or SIP, levels meaning a full solution in one small efficient package. In the future we expect to see combo NFC chips that bolt on to the current Bluetooth, WiFi chipsets from providers like Broadcom.

“The embedded secure element has a 760 Kilobyte (KB) high-density flash memory providing users with sufficient capacity to store one’s choice of diverse mobile services such as credit card codes, e-money, transportation transaction/payment services, coupon services and more.”

Samsung says that  the Secu-NFC Chip has been designed with pin-to-pin compatibility, which allows mobile device’s designers to immediately adopt the new solution without additional cost, engineering and design efforts. From a consumer’s perspective this is good news because it has now become easier for your favorite smartphone manufacturer to include NFC Chips in their phones.

The main benefits are that it uses less juice, it allows for more storage, it takes up less space and works even when a battery has been fully discharged. Samsung has also added high level encryption to the Secu-NFC Chip. The SENHRN1 is now available as samples to NFC phone manufacturers, so it may be a while until we see it hitting the market unless Samsung has a new phone of its own that will utilize the new SIP. We bet we can expect to see the new Samsung Secu-NFC Chip SIP in upcoming Samsung devices like the rumored Samsung Galaxy S III.