Infineon's contactless chips for MasterCard

MUNICH: Infineon Technologies AG today announced that it would provide contactless chips for select MasterCard Global payment schemes, which are being introduced in 13 countries worldwide, including Taiwan, Malaysia, Australia and the US.

Designed to make payment transactions more convenient than actual cash, magnetic-stripe cards or conventional chip-based cards, the future debit and credit cards will contain a chip featuring a contactless interface and state-of-the-art cryptographic capabilities, an Infineon statement said.

Infineon said that atleast 400 million chip-based payment cards were issued worldwide in 2006, with MasterCard and Visa programs alone accounting for about 17 million contactless chip cards.

According to market research company Frost & Sullivan, the conventional contactless payment smart card market is expected to see a compound annual growth rate of 63 per cent over the next five years.

Dr Helmut Gassel, vice president and general manager of the Chip Card and Security ICs business unit at Infineon Technologies, said, “Our combined expertise in security and contactless technology enables us to be the volume supplier not only in payment, but also in other major contactless markets such as e-passport deployments in the US and other countries or public transport projects such as “T-Money” in Korea.”

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