After Apple lifted the first wave in 2007, touch screen saw crazy application, hitting the peak last year, and finally becomes the basic characteristic of a phone. This year, the craziness passes to NFC chip which in fact has started the takeoff in 2012.
NFC is a set of standards for smartphones and similar devices to establish radio communication with each other by touching them together or bringing them into close proximity, usually no more than a few centimeters, said Wikipedia. From the definition, we can find smartphone is the protagonist in the game of NFC.
In addition to the private, fast and automated communication, another NFC advantage is more appealing to consumers-mobile payment. Driven by technology development, security factor and requirements for convenient life, today’s world is filled with cards, bank card, transportation card, shopping card… Despite the convenience, people also often fall into a kind of actual anxiety-worrying all the cards in a wallet lost or being stolen. Then what about integrating all cards just in one smartphone? Fueled by the bright future, NFC undoubtedly will see explosive growth as the use of touch screen.
In 2012, worldwide shipments of NFC-enabled cellphones reached 120.4 million; this figure is projected to increase to 268.4 million units, up 123 percent; further to 1.2 billion by 2017, according to
IHS. In this year, NFC-enabled devices (including smartphone, tablets and e-reader) will amount to 320 millions, rising by 118%.
Excluding Apple, nine out of the Top 10 smartphone suppliers have launched at least one NFC-enabled product into the market. NXP, the earliest participate into NFC chip segment, also has shipped125 million NFC chips in 2012 for smartphones and tablets. In the next few years, with application expanding to gaming, payments, security and other fields, NFC-enabled devices will play a role of leader.
On the Chinese market side, aside from the major smartphone brands, three carriers enlarge the cooperation with banks, investment in NFC technology as well. On January and February this year, China Mobile declared cooperation with China UnionPay, China Everbright Bank to introduce mobile wallet service. The same case also happened on another two operators-China Unicom and China Telecom.
Given to the huge market potential, NFC market is becoming increasingly fierce. Currently,
NXP dominated the market for NFC chips, fueled by its supply of NFC technology to Android device makers, especially Samsung Electronics; Infineon leads the NFC security microcontroller market. But ST, Broadcom, Samsung, Qualcomm and MediaTek all enlarges their attention and R & D to this field. For instance, ST launched the second-generation NFC controller chip-ST21NFCA; Broadcom began shipping its standalone NFC controller- the BCM20793…
Tags：
NFC, NFC chip, smartphone