(Free Press Release) MIFARE are the Semiconductors which are a series of chips commonly used in contact less smart cards and proximity cards. The trademark of the technology is owned by NXP Semiconductors (separated from Philips Electronics in the year 2006), its headquarters is in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and its core business sites are present in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and Hamburg, and Germany. MIFARE technology has been selected for most of the contact less smart card projects worldwide and therefore, it has become the most successful platform in the automatic fare collection industry. Moreover, its attractive product portfolio includes best solutions for other applications like loyalty, road tolling, access management and gaming.
The MIFARE name has been derived from the term MIkron Fare Collection System, which has 8 different variants of contact less cards:
• MIFARE Ultralight: introduced in 2001
• MIFARE Ultralight C: introduced in 2008
• MIFARE Classic: introduced in 1994
• MIFARE Plus: introduced in 2008
• MIFARE DESFire: introduced in 2002
• SmartMX:
• MIFARE DESFire EV1: introduced in 2006
• MIFARE SAM AV2: introduced in 2010
History of MIFARE
Mikron developed MIFARE; hence the name stands for MIkron FARE-collection System. In 1998, it was then acquired by Philips.
After that, Hitachi contracted for MIFARE license with Philips which was introduced to develop the contact less smart card solutions for NTT's IC telephone card, started in 1999 and which finished in 2006.
Motorola also tried to develop chip like MIFARE for the wired-logic version but finally gave up.
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