The technologies

The technologies.

A smart card is a credit card sized plastic card incorporating an integrated electronic circuit. Smart cards are one of four main types:

Memory only - often used as pre-payment cards for public telephones.
Microprocessor - this adds the possibility of incorporating security features for financial applications.
Contactless - eliminates the need to put the card in a reader which is useful in transport applications.
Combined contact/contactless - more expensive to manufacture but useful in some multi-application systems.

Smart cards will also be able to contain information about the user's preferred interface with a machine or terminal. For example a person with low vision can have a card that is encoded to tell the terminal to display large characters on the screen. A method of coding this information is contained in a draft European standard prEN1332-4.

Next topic