Example Applications - RFID: Fundamentals and Applications in Contactless Smart Cards and Identification - page 331

13
Example Applications
13.1 Contactless Smart Cards
The first plastic cards appeared in the USA as early as the beginning of the 1950s, when
cheap PVC replaced cardboard. In the years that followed, plastic credit cards became
widespread. Incidentally, the first credit card was issued by Diners Club in 1950.
The rapid development of semiconductor technology made it possible to integrate
data memory and protective logic onto a single silicon chip in the 1970s. The idea of
incorporating such an integrated memory chip into an identification card was patented
in 1968 by Jurgen Dethloff and Helmut Grotrupp in Germany. However, it was not until
almost 15 years later that the great breakthrough was achieved with the introduction
of the telephone smart card by the French company PTT. Several million telephone
smart cards were in circulation in France by 1986 (Rankl and Effing, 1996). These first
generation smart cards were memory cards with contacts. A significant improvement
was achieved when entire microprocessors were successfully integrated into a silicon
chip, and these chips incorporated into an identification card. This made it possible to
run software in a smart card, thus opening up the possibility of realising high-security
applications. Thus, smart cards for mobile telephones and the new bank cards (EC with
chip) were realised exclusively using microprocessor cards.
Since the mid-1980s, repeated attempts have been made to launch contactless smart
cards onto the market. The operating frequency of 135 kHz that was normal at the
time and the high power consumption of the silicon chips on the market necessitated
transponder coils with several hundred windings. The resulting large coil cross-section,
and the additional capacitors that were often required, impeded manufacture in the form
of ID-1 format plastic cards, and transponders were usually cast into inconvenient
plastic shells. Due to this limitation, contactless smart cards played a minor role in the
smart card market for a long time.
In the first half of the 1990s, transponder systems were developed with an operating
frequency of 13.56MHz. The transponders required for these systems required just
five windings. For the first time it was possible to produce transponder systems in the
0.76mm thick ID-1 format. The great breakthrough in Germany occurred in 1995, with
the introduction of the 'Frequent Traveller' contactless customer loyalty card in ID-1
format by the German company Lufthansa AG. It was noteworthy that these cards,
manufactured by the Munich company Giesecke & Devrient, still had a magnetic strip,