Tyfone Announces Patents for Design that Reduces NFC Antennas for Mass Production

Tyfone Inc. on Monday announced it has been awarded a pair of U.S. patents that the Portland, Ore.-based company says should make it easier to manufacture in commercial quantities key elements for mobile payments based on near-field communication (NFC) technology. NFC is a two-way contactless technology that allows, for example, mobile phones to interact with point-of-sale terminals for payments.

The patents, Nos. 7,954,716 and 7,961,101, refer to a design that minimizes the space necessary on a plastic card for an NFC antenna. This allows for high-volume manufacture of NFC-based micro secure-digital (SD) and SIM cards for use with mobile devices without reducing the antenna or requiring external devices for the phone such as battery covers or booster antennas, Tyfone says. Reduced antennas can shrink the so-called read distance of a device, or the maximum distance at which a POS reader can pick up an NFC signal.

“The biggest constraint on a mobile phone is there’s not enough space,” says Siva Narendra, Tyfone’s chief technology officer. “The majority of the volume [inside the phone] is taken up by the battery.” But with its new patents, he says, Tyfone is making available for mobile devices, in a format that lends itself to mass production, the same signal power that is available on standard-size contactless cards.

Tyfone’s announcement comes as the payments industry is adjusting to new requirements laid out by Visa Inc. last August, and since echoed by other major payment networks, that lay the groundwork for widespread deployment of NFC and chip card technology at the point of sale in the U.S. Among the deadlines established by the network policies is a shift of fraud liability to merchants that aren’t equipped with EMV/NFC-capable terminals by October 2015.

That requirement, says Narendra, will stoke demand for high-volume production of so-called secure elements, or bits of plastic embedded with the silicon and wiring for NFC. That in turn will force manufacturers to confront the problem of miniaturization of NFC antennas on a mass-production scale, providing a market for Tyfone’s design, he says. “As the fire is being lit [by the new network policies], we’re adding more fuel to it,” he adds.

Tyfone says its new design works with any form factor for NFC, but it started with micro SD cards to demonstrate the design’s space efficiencies. “The micro SD card [imposes] the most severe [space] constraint of all,” Narendra says. “The SIM card is bigger, for example.” Micro SD cards fitted with an NFC secure element can be inserted in a slot in a mobile phone, whereas SIM cards identify the device to the carrier network and remain inside the phone for as long it is in service.

Narendra says the new generation of Tyfone’s SideTap micro SD card, which will incorporate NFC with the new design, will be able to be manufactured in mass quantities with the same cost efficiency as a micro SD card without NFC. Tyfone is also in talks with manufacturers to license its patents, he says. “We are in the process of negotiating several global deals,” he adds.