Mike McCamon, Executive Director of industry association NFC Forum, explores Certification Release 15, highlighting its extended operating range, enhanced reliability, and how it enables seamless, next-generation NFC experiences across diverse industries and devices.
In June this year, NFC Forum announced the launch of NFC Release 15. This brought to life one of the core objectives of the organisation’s five year roadmap, originally published in 2023, to extend the Operating Volume for NFC Forum certified compliant devices and tags from 5mm to 20mm – OV5 to OV20.
This fourfold increase is expected to advance new and exciting use cases across a variety of sectors including payments, automotive, transit and access control.
One of the key focal points in the development of NFC Release 15 was to ensure that this enhanced functionality didn’t come at the expense of the reliability people have come to expect from their interactions with NFC Forum-compliant devices. Over the past 20 years, NFC has built its reputation as a trusted technology which is so fundamental to our everyday lives that it has become almost invisible to most users; developers of the new standard knew this had to be preserved.
Reliable and consistent NFC user experiences have been built on the back of the robust NFC Forum Certification Program, which demonstrates a mark of trust that a product will meet baseline expectations of performance, security and reliability. The publication of NFC Release 15 and its extended range advancement therefore necessitate an accompanying Certification Release – CR15 – that is able to certify that devices perform as expected and match these capabilities.
What is Certification Release 15?
CR15 is the latest update to the NFC Forum Certification Program and defines the testing program to certify compliance with the NFC Release 15 Specification. This will enable businesses to test up to the extended OV20 range that was designed using the collaborative effort of NFC industry leaders, to provide consistent user experiences across both current and next generation devices and ensure that products perform as expected. CR15 tests product conformance against the latest NFC functional standards, after which successful devices are declared Certified Compliant with NFC Forum Specifications.
The headline change in this update is its support for the newly extended operating volume. Extending the Operating Volume in the Z-axis is an important step to ensuring that NFC continues to meet market demands and industry needs. It also enhances usability across multiple use cases by reducing the need for precise alignment between devices.
For developers and manufacturers, the new test cases of CR15 ensure that they can design their products to promise consistent performance within this expanded range. All new products that fall within what NFC Forum defines as its generic device classes – referring to Mobile, Reader, Card Emulation and Universal devices – must hereon be compliant with OV20. Tag devices with very small antenna form factors may not be capable of meeting the 20mm operating volume due to constraints of physics, and, therefore, device manufacturers for this device class have the choice between OV20 and OV5. have the choice between OV20 and OV5.
And while new devices can be designed with the necessary hardware to facilitate extended range, it is crucial that devices compliant with the new OV20 remain compatible with in-field devices compliant with the current OV5. Therefore, CR15 ensures that devices tested against the new standard not only keep backward compatibility with OV5 but also between all form factors between Class 1 and Class 6 antenna, making interoperability between all form factors and both Operating Volumes seamless.
Supporting the Next Generation of Contactless Use Cases
The introduction of CR 15 supports a new wave of innovative use cases for NFC adoption, boosting speed, reliability and user convenience. A notable example of this comes from the automotive industry where, when accounting for the diverse positioning of an NFC chip within different smartphones and the range of a car door handle or side mirror designs, the angle at which the smartphone needs to be positioned to unlock the door will vary considerably. A reliable, extended range connection can therefore make digital keys faster, easier and more secure.
Similarly, with compact form factors becoming more and more popular, ensuring secure and effortless connections for wearable devices can be a key design differentiator for manufacturers. Adherence with CR15 provides a guarantee to customers that a product such as a smartwatch will be able to transact perfectly, with the extended range support meaning that the wearer will not need to contort their wrist to get perfect alignment.
Certification Matters More Than Ever
Certification is a shared benchmark for quality, security and functional interoperability. It transcends manufacturers, geographies and applications to focus purely on creating a connected device ecosystem that put the user experience first.
But that’s not to say that those developing devices and solutions don’t stand to benefit too. For manufacturers, certification serves as proof that their hardware is compatible with other devices, helping push adoption. Meanwhile, developers can work with confidence knowing that applications will perform consistently across all certified devices.
Author biography:
Mike McCamon is a seasoned technology executive with over 30 years of experience in the tech industry. He is currently the Executive Director of NFC Forum, an industry association dedicated to advancing NFC, standards and use cases. He has been both the inaugural executive director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group and later on, part of the executive team that launched Water.org. He also led high-growth teams at Apple, Iomega, Intel and several startups.
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