NXP and Gemalto sign licensing agreement for adding Mifare to UICC

Today, Gemalto announced that Gemalto and NXP signed a licensing agreement for adding Mifare to Gemalto’s SIM products.

Gemalto is clearly the global market leader in providing banking smart cards. What else? Gemalto also has an OTA platform for mobile network operators. Gemalto is a member of Open Handset Alliance -the organization behind Android, which officialy announced the NFC support very short time ago. They even acquired the Mifare4Mobile team from NXP two years ago. Well, putting them all together, we can say that they have “the whole package” for an NFC ecosystem.

Without a doubt, transport ticketing is the killer application for NFC and Mifare is the strongest player for hosting the transport ticketing applications. All the mifare classic hacks couldn’t change this. NXP announced that 4 byte UIDs reached the end and they will start non-unique 4 byte UIDs or 7 byte UIDs for Mifare Classic.

So adding a mifare emulation applet on top of Gemalto’s current product range means only one thing; mifare based ticketing systems have a clear path for an NFC project. Gemalto can provide an end-to-end solution for transport operators, regulatory authorities, or even to banks for running a mifare based application via mobile phones.

Again; the only missing part is still the lack of handsets with NFC support!