Infineon Technologies AG expands its SECORA™ Pay solutions portfolio to 28 nm technology. With this, the company further pushes the limits of payment cards with new, innovative product designs. In addition, it also offers the latest technology as a reliable sourcing option to all regional payment ecosystems. The new product family is the first of its kind on the market using leading edge 28 nm chip technology with an embedded non-volatile memory. It is targeting to relieve the pain that payment industry has been experiencing due to the semiconductor shortages in mature technology nodes.
“In recent years, touchless payment experience with dual-interface payment cards has become a global standard, among others also driven by the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Tolgahan Yildiz, Head of Payment Solutions at Infineon’s Connected Secure Systems Division. “The SECORA Pay solution portfolio is tailored to enable manufacturing and issuance of high quality dual-interface payment cards and delivers highest transaction performance with reliable security for trusted seamless payments.” The global dual-interface payment card market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of six percent from 2022 to 2027, starting from an estimated 2.6 billion units in 2022[1].
The new plug-and-play solutions from Infineon offer a simple onboarding and migration path for card manufacturers. They are backward-compatible with existing SECORA Pay product offerings in terms of card production, antenna design, personalization, and product certification. Furthermore, the devices provide industry-leading contactless and personalization performance, enabling contactless transactions within 155 ms[2].
The product family uses a security controller with certified software integrated into Coil on Module (CoM) chip modules and is using standardized inlays for easy and fast card production compatible with SECORA Pay products on 65 nm, 40 nm and
28 nm technology – one inlay sheet fits the already available and the new SECORA Pay generation. The CoM system offers maximum flexibility in card design as Infineon uses inductive coupling technology in combination with copper wired card antennas. It is therefore perfectly suited for future market trends such as environmentally friendly cards made of recycled and ocean-bound plastic or wood, as well as high-performance dual-interface metal or LED cards.
In addition, SECORA Pay solutions support the highest throughput in card production with minimal resources for manufacturing highly robust dual-interface cards. This makes contactless payment technology itself resource-efficient. New value-added services based on SECORA Pay’s NFC tag functionality enable further use cases such as initial card activation as well as authentication for online banking and for loyalty programs.
Availability
Product versions supporting the latest Visa and Mastercard applications are available now with extremely long approval life time. Certified applets for American Express, Discover and others will follow later this year. More information is available here.
[1] Source: ABI research, Payment and Banking Card Secure IC Technologies, August 2022
[2] with 144 byte key, according to the new 2023 Mastercard performance policy
