smartcards

A detailed Summary of smartcards

A Smartcard is a standard credit card sized plastic card with an integrated circuit embedded in it. This integrated circuit includes a microprocessor and a bit of memory, which together hold information in electronic form and controls who uses the information and how they use it. The Smartcards ability to store and control many different types of information, as well as its large storage capacity, gives rise to several Smartcard applications. For example, a single Smartcard could take the place of a credit card, a debit card and even be used as an electronic purse to carry Electric-cash (E-cash). The plastic card itself can incorporate words and pictures or graphics printed on it which can be easily understood by the card holder as well as the people the card holder meets. The integrated circuit holds information in electronic form that can be easily, securely and accurately accessed by all sorts of electronic data processing equipment.

Some Smartcards are smarter than others, the smartness of a card depends on the complexity of the embedded processor, as well as the software that is installed on the chip. Even the simplest cards, like the pay phone cards, are smart enough that they are virt

In January 1974 Roland Moreno, a Frenchman and former reporter, devised a revolutionary new payment system. His idea was an electronic stored value application mounted on a ring. His idea was simple, when the bearer needed money, they would "load" the currency onto the ring therefore enabling the bearer to be able to spend electronic money at a store which had the suitable electronic equipment. Then in March 1974 Roland presented his project to a few French banks where he demonstrated a transaction-taking place from the ring to the reading device. In September 1974 the first chip was mounted onto an epoxy card and this was the birth of "Smartcards".

A prediction by Philips SmartCard Technology is that there will be 800 million smartcards in Europe by the year 2000 and 2 billion worldwide. Companies are trying to push their smartcards onto consumers and are even sending them in the post to random customers such as Visa and MasterCard. Worldwide governments are looking into the use of smartcard technology for ID cards, Driving licenses, Social security, Health and Passports. Also most British universities now have some kind of Smartcard technology ranging from NUS cards to access cards and ID cards.

microprocessor supplied by Motorola. The card was then publicly demonstrated in New York at American Express. The first Smartcard to be used as a "Cardiac pacemaker user identity card" was a bi-chip CP8 and then the first Tele payment experiment in the world was in the town of Velizy in France in 1981. A

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Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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