ISO/IEC 14443


ISO/IEC 14443 Identification cards – Contactless integrated circuit cards – Proximity cards is an international standard that defines proximity cards used for identification, and the transmission protocols for communicating with it. The development of ISO/IEC 14443 began in the early 1990s, driven by the growing need for secure and efficient short-range wireless communication technologies for identification and payment systems. ISO/IEC 14443 is called contactless short-range standard with a higher RF speed compared to some other RFID standard such as ISO/IEC 15693.

Standard

The standard is developed by ISO/IEC JTC 1 (Joint Technical Committee 1) / SC 17 (Subcommittee 17) / WG 8.

Parts

  • ISO/IEC 14443-1:2018 Part 1: Physical characteristic
  • ISO/IEC 14443-2:2020 Part 2: Radio frequency power and signal interface
  • ISO/IEC 14443-3:2018 Part 3: Initialization and anticollision
  • ISO/IEC 14443-4:2018 Part 4: Transmission protocol

Types

Cards may be Type A and Type B, both of which communicate via radio at 13.56 MHz. The main differences between these types concern modulation methods, coding schemes and protocol initialization procedures. Both Type A and Type B cards use the same transmission protocol. The transmission protocol specifies data block exchange and related mechanisms:
  1. data block chaining
  2. waiting time extension
  3. multi-activation
ISO/IEC 14443 uses the following terms for components:

Modulation methods

Type A cards use amplitude-shift keying with Modified Miller coding for reader-to-tag communication. For tag-to-reader communication, they use on-off keying with Manchester code.
Type B cards use ASK with NRZ coding for reader-to-tag communication and binary phase-shift keying with NRZ-L encoding for tag-to-reader communication.
Both Type A and Type B cards only allow half duplex communication with a 106 kbit per second data rate in each direction. Data transmitted by the card is load modulated with a 847.5 kHz subcarrier. Data Rate106 kbps106 kbps

Physical size

Part 1 of the standard specifies that the card shall be compliant with ISO/IEC 7810 or ISO/IEC 15457-1, or "an object of any other dimension".

Notable implementations