What is a Smart Card?

Before I outline the technology requirements of the project, I think it is helpful to define what exactly a smart card is. The actual term smart card comes from France. It was during a period of national investment and modernisation in France during the 1970's which led to the development of the Carte a Memoire. This was later renamed by the governments marketing department equivalent (the Intelimatique) as the smart card. Although sometimes referred to as a chip card or an integrated circuit card, for purposes of this report I will refer to the device as a smart card. Smart Card Forum (1996).

The card itself tends to be similar in size to today's plastic payment card, except it has an actual silicon computer chip embedded in it. A small gold or silver contact connected to the chip inside the card is usually visible on the surface. This allows it to be programmed with a much more sophisticated range of information than say magnetic strip cards, which can only hold basic numerical data such as an account number. Smart Card Forum (1996).

There are also different types of smart cards, as outlined by

ii) The second type of card is often called a memory card. Memory cards are primarily information storage cards that contain a stored value which the user can "spend". These cards may be used in a pay phone for example and are more likely to be used and thrown away after a duration of time.

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