INSIDE strengthens family of smart card reader solutions

AIX-EN-PROVENCE, FRANCE: INSIDE Contactless, a leader in semiconductor solutions for secure transactions and digital identity, has integrated new, proprietary advanced firmware into its AT90SCR series of smart card reader microcontrollers to enable device manufacturers to create a complete, ready-to-use family of low-cost smart card reader solutions tailored to speed the development of a variety of high-volume contact and contactless applications.

The industry’s first family of turnkey smart card reader solutions based on advanced 0.15-micron technology, INSIDE’s AT90SCR100 and AT90SCR050 microcontrollers are pre-certified to all relevant industry standards, including EMV2000, PC/SC, ISO 7816 and WHQL, and are able to slash customer development times from about a year to just two to four weeks.

“The announcement demonstrates our commitment to customers to continue providing a compelling family of turnkey smart card solutions they can depend on for creating new contact and contactless designs,” said Jean-Charles Lesage, smart card reader business line manager for INSIDE Contactless. “Now our customers can continue to optimize their applications using our pre-certified one-chip solutions with confidence while having the flexibility to select the one best suited to their needs.”

All of INSIDE’s AT90SCR-series smart card microcontrollers create a bridge between the host processor and a contact or USB smart card. They all feature INSIDE’s proven smart card interface block, an ISO 7816 UART compliant with ISO 7816, EMV2000, and WHQL 5-, 3-, 1.8-V standards that provides up to a 12MHz clock to the smart card. INSIDE’s efficient DC-to-DC converter offers high efficiency when supplying the standard smart card voltages. All AT90SCR series solutions also offer USB and serial host interfaces for maximum design flexibility.

INSIDE’s AT90SCR100 series features a robust assortment of communication, smart card and peripheral configurations, including high-speed and standard SPI interfaces, two-wire interface and USB 2.0 full speed device and host controller able to support USB smart cards, as well as a hardware AES crypto engine and random number generator. All offer 4KB of data SRAM and EEPROM plus 16KB, 32KB or 64KB of flash code memory.

INSIDE’s AT90SCR050 is designed to provide a solution everywhere a simple, very low cost USB smart card reader is needed. While this 16KB ROM-based solution offers a more limited set of features, it employs the same powerful 8/16-bit RISC core as AT90SCR100 flash-based devices and 100-percent byte code compatibility in a choice of several compacts packages, including die form.

“INSIDE has outdone themselves with their new turnkey smart card solutions, providing all the features and functionality we have come to expect from them with a very competitive price point and the certainty of their availability well into the future because of the modern process technology,” said Indranil Sinha, senior product manager, Innovative Products Group at INTEL. “In addition, because their firmware has been developed in house, INSIDE was able to offer us a custom solution suited to our specific needs.”