NXP’s MIFARE to power Madrid’s new contactless ticketing service
06 December, 2010
category: Contactless, NFC, Transit
NXP Semiconductors announced that its MIFARE DESFire EV1 contactless microcontroller IC has been chosen to power Madrid’s new contactless Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) scheme for the city’s public transit network.
Operated by the Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid (CRTM), the public transportation system covers the city’s urban metro, bus and suburban rail networks, which are run by more than 50 different private operators. According to NXP, Madrid’s 5.2 million citizens make over 1.8 billion journeys across the network annually.
Based on MIFARE DESFire EV1, NXP’s contactless IC technology will be used to drive all season tickets including subsidized travel tickets for younger and retired passengers. MIFARE DESFire is an open architecture platform for end-to-end fare collections solutions, and is already up and running in multiple cities worldwide, including London, New Delhi and Nanjing.
According to NXP, multi-application services can be added onto the platform, such as banking convergence cards through the MIFARE DESFire EV1 implementations on payment cards or NFC applications on mobile phones. These services are enabled by supporting products from licensed partners of NXP.
MIFARE DESFire EV1 is based upon open global standards for both air interfaces and cryptographic methods, offering data transfer rates of up to 848 kbit/s and leveraging a Triple DES, 3K DES, and AES hardware cryptographic engine for securing the data on the smart cards and data during transmission.