Inside Contactless to work with FIME on NFC interoperability Test and certificaution one step toward common mobile payments infrastructure By Loring Wirbel EE Times October 30, 2008 (01:44 PM EST)   Recent Articles News RF4CE-based RF remote controls to be showcased at CES Mobile phone service first in UK for underground commuters in Glasgow Comsys baseband IC powers dual-mode mobile WiMAX/EDGE device at CES IBM claims fastest graphene transistor GaAs device sector set for 5% fall in '09 Bluetooth chip market to reach $2 billion in 2009 Archives COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Inside Contactless, the French IC specialist in Near-Field Communications, is partnering with smartcard terminal testing developer FIME to work on common interoperability and test procedures for mobile payment infrastructure based on NFC. Philippe Betoin, vice president of strategy and device marketing at Inside Contactless, said the intent was not to supplant any efforts of ETSO, ISO, or the NFC Forum, but to offer new interoperability test methods which others in the industry could develop. The effort may lead to multi-vendor "plugfest" events in the future. "Certainly, we have seen significant growth in mobile payments in recent months, but there needs to be more efforts to move interoperability beyond the RF layer, and include higher-layer protocols," Betoin said. Betoin pointed out that Inside Contactless played a key role in developing the Host Controller Interface and Single Wire Protocol for NFC, and thus has experience in working with customers and partners on protocols going beyond the physical layer. Inside and FIME will work on interfacing SIM cards and other Secure Element modules to the RF subsystem.