Samsung Develops Industry's Highest Capacity EEPROM-embedded Dual Interface Smart Card IC

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., the leader in advanced semiconductor technology, announced today that it has developed two dual interface smart card ICs ? product names S3CC9GC and S3CC9GW with 72kB and 144kB of embedded Electrically Erasable and Programmable ROM (EEPROMs) respectively. Samsung's new smart card ICs meets world-class smart card IC specifications for financial transactions and can store all types of personal and biological data that will eventually be required for electronic passports.

Samsung's new dual interface ICs allow both contact and contactless operations. The new ICs utilize Samsung's proprietary 16bit CalmRISC™ high-performance processor and RSA co-processor to enable PKI-type financial transactions and support a wide range of applications with encryption engines that have various symmetrical encryption algorithms such as 3-DES/AES.

Samsung's new ICs support both A and B types of contactless ISO14443 interfaces, making it 100 percent compatible with existing dual interface cards. The new ICs also virtually eliminate information leakage thanks to a robust anti-hacking design technology.

According to market research firm, Dataquest, the demand for combi cards is expected to rise 50 percent from 250 million to 516 million by 2008.

"Samsung prides itself on sensing market changes and applying its leading-edge technology to meet those needs ahead of the competition." said Chung Chilhee, senior vice president of Samsung Electronics' System LSI business. "We've already done that last year with the development of a 512kB EEPROM-embedded smart card IC, a 1MB Flash Memory-embedded smart card IC, and a 128MB NAND Flash Memory-embedded smart card. We're continuing on the same track with the introduction of our dual interface card ICs."

Samsung plans to begin mass-production of the new products in the second half of this year and will make the ICs available to smart card companies worldwide.