Consistent RF performance is essential to smooth and swift NFC interactions, fulfilling NFC’s promise of a seamless experience for the consumer. The testing milestone comes at an opportune time: according to IHS Technology, global shipments of NFC-enabled mobile phones will surge four-fold from 2013 to 2018, reaching 1.2 billion units and penetrating 63% of the global mobile phone market. Transparency Market Research reports that the NFC market is expected to reach 20 billion USD by 2019.
The NFC Forum also announced the availability of Logical Link Control Protocol (LLCP) and Simple NDEF Exchange Protocol (SNEP) certification testing, increasing testing coverage for the communications protocol layers. LLCP is the communication protocol used in NFC’s peer-to-peer mode, and SNEP is a protocol for exchanging NFC Forum defined record structures on top of LLCP.
With the additions announced today, the Certification Program offers comprehensive testing for all of the communication layers that are needed to support NFC use cases. This means that application developers can have full confidence in the underlying layers in a certified device and focus on their parts of the NFC ecosystem.
Open to all Forum members, the NFC Forum Certification Program gives manufacturers a means of establishing that their products conform to the NFC Forum Technical Specifications, ensuring consistency in the behavior of compliant devices, and thereby setting the foundation for interoperability. The Certification Program also affords differentiation for NFC Forum members by shortening the product adoption process, lowering adoption costs, and making product implementations easier for partners to integrate.
„The availability of analog testing is a milestone in our Certification Program,“ said Koichi Tagawa, NFC Forum Chairman. „When a device is certified as compliant with NFC Forum specifications – and the analog specification in particular – it provides consumers with a better assurance that NFC’s easy touch interface will deliver the comfortable and consistent experience they expect. We are grateful for the coordinated efforts of the NFC Forum members, test labs, and tool vendors that have made analog testing possible.“
The Certification Program ensures compliance with NFC Forum specifications for the lower communication layers of an NFC-enabled device, including digital protocol, tag operations, activity, and now analog, LLCP, and SNEP. In order for a device to provide a consistent user experience, all these layers must be properly implemented.