Smart Card Technology: History

Smart Card Technology Student’s Name Grand Canyon University: <Course> <Date> A typical wallet would contain cash, debit or credit cards, driver’s license, other valid IDs and some photos. Thus, its loss would be very troublesome. However with the advancing technology, all these cards and cash can be possibly replaced by a single smart card sooner or later. According to Singh et al. (2018), a smart card is a portable device with microprocessor systems consisting of embedded integrated circuits that can process and store large amount of information and applications. These cards are usually made of flexible materials such as polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS). On the other hand, the smart card chip, which is the part that contains the microprocessors, is usually placed on the edges of smart cards for protection. Furthermore, the details on the evolution and features of smart card technology will be discussed on the succeeding parts of the paper. History of Smart Cards Smart cards were primarily created to reduce the need of carrying large amounts of cash (Singh et al., 2018). Nowadays, its application have expanded beyond banking and finances. During 1968-1969, the two German engineers namely, Helmut Gröttrup and Jürgen Dethloff developed the first smart cards for secure identification. In 1974, Roland Moreno patented the concept of smart cards and used it for financial transactions in France. Modern smart cards with microprocessor and memory, however, were based from the patent of Dethloff in 1976. Finally in 1977, Michel Ugon created the first encrypted, microprocessor smart card and because of that he was tagged as one of the pioneers of electronic banking (Mahajan et al., 2014). On the other hand, initial smart cards that contained magnetic stripes were created and used by the International Air Transportation Association (IATA) during 1970s. This card could hold up to 210 bit/inch of data (Mahajan et al., 2014). And in 1990s, smart cards with microchips had superseded those cards with magnetic stripes with its greater storage capacity, reliability and durability (Singh et al., 2018). Moreover, contactless smart cards have become a trend since 1990s. Beforehand, smart cards had stored data in the form of barcodes that would require barcode readers. But with the invention of contactless smart cards data can be picked up and interpreted aerially with greater security at a lower cost (Singh et al., 2018). Characteristics and Uses of Smart Cards Smart cards have different types of memories that include Read Only Memory (ROM), Random Access Memory (RAM), Electronically Erasable Programmable Memory (EEPROM) and Non-Volatile Memory (NVM). These memory chips are usually placed at the second layer of embedded microchip (Singh et al., 2018). Meanwhile, smart cards were mainly classified into two: memory smart cards and processor-enabled smart cards. Memory smart cards have limited storage capacity and data transmission, which is only in one direction. Also, these cards only allow offline usage. On the contrary, processor-enabled smart cards use cryptographic technology that enables secure, bi-directional data transmission and huge data processing (Singh et al., 2018). With its numero...