Overview Near Field Communications (NFC) technology isn’t exactly a household word, even though the wireless technology is incorporated in more than 1.5 billion smartphones*, forms the basis of secure wireless point-of-sale payment systems, and is projected to become a $20 billion market by 2020 and more than twice that by 2024**. This massive growth will come not only from current applications but from hundreds of others yet to be explored. However, this won’t occur unless manufacturers and designers fully understand how the unique attributes of NFC can benefit their products, and it’s also essential that incorporating NFC be as simple as possible. For example, it just makes sense that NFC functionality should be integrated within components such as microcontrollers, as they complement each other. NXP has taken a step toward this today with the LPC8N04 MCU, the first broad-market microcontroller to integrate an NFC tag interface within its package. This complements the NFC controller PN7462 family featuring a full NFC reader. To appreciate how NFC and microcontrollers can work together to achieve great things at low cost, it’s important to understand what NFC technology is--and what it is not. NFC is an offshoot of RFID, which was designed to identify objects and gain some information about them without a physical connection between the object and a reader. It can do this even if the distance between the RFID tag that stores information about the object and the device that reads it is tens or hundreds of feet away. In contrast, NFC operates only over very short distances up to about four inches, which not only makes the technology very inexpensive but makes communication between the tag and reader very secure and difficult to intercept. It’s also why NFC is the technology of choice for point-of-sale applications and mobile wallets where security is paramount. NFC was designed to be versatile as it can operate in three modes: card emulation, reader/writer, and peer-to-peer. Card emulation makes NFC-enabled devices such as smartphones act like smart cards, reader/writer mode lets NFC-enabled devices read information stored on tags, and NFC peer-to-peer allows two NFC-enabled devices to exchange information.
Detailed whitepaper attached below.
 | LPC8N04NFCWP.pdf |