City of Istanbul Selects NXP’s Multi-Application ID Technology for Public Transport System 18. November 2011
NXP Semiconductors N.V. (NASDAQ: NXPI) announced that the city of Istanbul, Turkey, has selected NXP’s MIFARE DESFire™ EV1 contactless microcontroller to power the Automated Fare Collection (AFC) element of its redeveloped public transportation system. The Istanbulkart project, developed by systems integrator Belbim, is one of the largest and most diverse AFC projects within the EMEA region. It unites the city’s different modes of transport – including buses, ferry boats, metro, light metro, trams and overground trains – and enables residents to get around Istanbul using a single travel card. With over 4.5 million Istanbulkarts already deployed in recent months, the MIFARE DESFire-based system delivers an improved level of service, as well as a convenient and secure payment model to passengers.
Turkey has emerged as a true pioneer in deploying ID technology for banking, identity and mobile transactions, utilizing many of NXP’s advanced ID solutions, and will be featured as the special guest country at CARTES & IDentification, Paris, November 15-17, 2011. By introducing secure contactless technology to public transport, Istanbul joins more than 650 cities around the world that have improved the efficiency, security and convenience of their transportation systems with NXP MIFARE technology, including London, St. Petersburg and Rio de Janeiro. At Cartes 2011, NXP will showcase its MIFARE™ technology alongside many other ID applications and use cases at booth 4J 035, Hall4.
“The key aim of the Istanbulkart project is to make it easier for all of Istanbul’s residents to travel across the city, regardless of what mode of transport they use. After a successful pilot, the scheme is now available to all of the city’s residents,” said Harun Maden, General Manager, Belbim. “The NXP MIFARE DESFire technology platform is the ideal solution for our AFC project because it supports multiple applications such as the planned City Card concept. Using this platform will enable us to extend Istanbulkart functionality to support other services such as contactless car park payments, cinema access, or taxi payments in the future.”
“As one of the most diverse and largest AFC projects in EMEA, Belbim needed a trusted and proven contactless solution which was flexible enough be used on a transport network consisting of buses, ferry boats, metro, trams and trains,” said Henri Ardevol, vice president and general manager, secure transactions, NXP Semiconductors. “NXP’s ID solutions are used by hundreds of millions of people throughout the world on a daily basis, offering assurance to public transport organizations and passengers alike.”
NXP’s MIFARE DESFire EV1 was uniquely built around the needs of public transport operators and access management service providers, offering fast read rates as well as advanced security and privacy features. By supporting multiple applications on a single microcontroller, MIFARE DESFire EV1 is enabling a major shift in the identification market toward offering multiple services via a single contactless smartcard – for example, combining access management or micropayments alongside automatic transport ticketing. Further, the MIFARE DESFire platform goes beyond this to enable seamless extensions of ticketing solutions on banking CPU ICs or the secure elements in NFC-enabled mobile devices.
MIFARE DESFire is based on open global standards for both air interfaces and cryptographic methods. In addition to offering data transfer rates of up to 848 kbit/s, MIFARE DESFire utilizes a Triple DES, 3K DES, and AES hardware cryptographic engine for securing the data on the smartcards and data during transmission.