ISO/IEC 14443

ISO/IEC 14443 Identification cards – Contactless integrated circuit cards – Proximity cards is an international standard that defines proximity cards used for identification, and the transmission protocols for communicating with it. The development of ISO/IEC 14443 began in the early 1990s, driven by the growing need for secure and efficient short-range wireless communication technologies for identification and payment systems. ISO/IEC 14443 is called contactless short-range standard with a higher RF speed compared to some other RFID standard such as ISO/IEC 15693.

Standard

The standard is developed by ISO/IEC JTC 1 (Joint Technical Committee 1) / SC 17 (Subcommittee 17) / WG 8 (Working Group 8).

Parts

ISO/IEC 14443-1:2018 Part 1: Physical characteristic

ISO/IEC 14443-2:2020 Part 2: Radio frequency power and signal interface

ISO/IEC 14443-3:2018 Part 3: Initialization and anticollision

ISO/IEC 14443-4:2018 Part 4: Transmission protocol

Types

Cards may be Type A and Type B, both of which communicate via radio at 13.56 MHz (RFID HF). The main differences between these types concern modulation methods, coding schemes (Part 2) and protocol initialization procedures (Part 3). Both Type A and Type B cards use the same transmission protocol (described in Part 4). The transmission protocol specifies data block exchange and related mechanisms:

data block chaining

waiting time extension

multi-activation

ISO/IEC 14443 uses the following terms for components:

PCD: proximity coupling device (the card reader)

PICC: proximity integrated circuit card

Modulation methods

Type A cards use amplitude-shift keying (ASK) with Modified Miller coding for reader-to-tag communication. For tag-to-reader communication, they use on-off keying (OOK) with Manchester code.

Type B cards use ASK with NRZ coding for reader-to-tag communication and binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) with NRZ-L encoding for tag-to-reader communication.