In addition to mobile payment, can smart home become another market fulcrum for NFC?

Among the many wireless interconnection technologies, NFC technology, which was born in 2002, has a very distinct personality - it operates at a frequency of 13.56MHz, with a maximum rate of 848kbps and a typical communication distance of 10cm. Compared with other wireless communication technologies, it is more controlled and safer. Since two NFC communicating devices can establish two-way data interaction as long as one of them is powered, and the other can be in a passive state without power consumption, NFC also has a significant low power consumption advantage.

However, for a long time, NFC has been in a tepid state, but now this situation is changing. According to the forecast released by Research and Markets, the global NFC market will grow rapidly to US$47.43 billion by 2024. The two main reasons for this development are the popularity of NFC terminal devices and the rapid development of mobile payments.

According to a market report released by ScientiaMobile, from 2015 to 2018, the proportion of mobile phones equipped with NFC function in the total shipments of the world's top 12 smartphone manufacturers has continued to grow, and NFC has become a standard configuration for mid-to-high-end mobile phones. Taking Huawei as an example, the share of its NFC-enabled mobile phones has increased from 38.32% to 71%; Xiaomi's latest flagship mobile phone Xiaomi 9 launched in 2019 also uses the new generation of NFC function as a new selling point. It can be seen that the user-side hardware environment of NFC applications is becoming more and more mature.

In the field of mobile payment, although QR code scanning payment dominated by Alipay and WeChat still occupies the mainstream of the market, NFC payment has found its foothold and started to expand its sphere of influence. At present, swiping NFC mobile phones to take buses and subways has become the norm for many urban office workers; Cloud QuickPass based on NFC technology promoted by UnionPay has reached 120 million users in one year since its launch. Major mobile phone manufacturers and operators have also tried to establish their own payment business ecosystem through NFC to break the monopoly of QR code payment. With such user awareness and development momentum, the "ambition" of any technology will surely be stimulated.

In fact, when NFC first came out, its market "ambition" was not limited to mobile payments. From a technical point of view, NFC defines three different communication interaction modes, namely:

• Read/Write Mode: An NFC-enabled device interacts with another device to obtain information or initiate an operation. The device initiating the operation can read data from another device or write data to that device.

• Peer-to-peer mode: Also known as "P2P" mode, this mode can be used to exchange files between NFC devices or earn membership points when shopping.

• Card emulation mode: This mode allows NFC smartphones to "emulate" contactless smart cards that comply with the ISO/IEC 14443 standard and "swipe" them on the existing contactless smart card infrastructure. The applications you can imagine include ticketing, access control, transportation, toll gates and payments.

From this point of view, the NFC payment function that we are familiar with on smartphones currently only uses one of the three communication interaction modes of NFC, "card emulation", and the technical potential of NFC is far from being fully utilized. Where is the stage for NFC to flourish? It is generally believed that the smart home market is likely to be an important carrier.

Figure 1. Typical application scenarios of NFC in smart home devices (Source: NXP)

Based on the technical characteristics of NFC, we might as well imagine the role it can play in future smart homes.

Device pairing: More and more home appliances need to be paired and interconnected with mobile phones, such as the wireless Bluetooth headsets and speakers we are familiar with, but the cumbersome pairing process may discourage users. Now, just bring two NFC-enabled devices close to each other to create a connection, and pairing is completed instantly without any conflict between devices.

Network debugging: Adding new smart device nodes to the smart home network will be a high-frequency demand in the future. Since NFC can trigger other wireless communication protocols, no matter whether you want to add Bluetooth, ZigBee or Wi-Fi devices to the home network, you only need to touch the NFC-enabled node device and the home gateway to complete the device networking. This method can also prevent other "unwanted" nodes from being added, providing a better user experience and a higher level of security.

Human-machine interface expansion: Many IoT devices in smart homes do not have more advanced user interaction interfaces such as graphical display screens due to limited resources or functional requirements, and the human-machine interface is not friendly. If the NFC function is integrated into home appliances, the phone screen can be turned into an extended human-machine interface of the home appliance by simply touching the NFC phone and the device. Users can easily perform more complex settings and controls on the home appliances through this interface.

Accessory anti-counterfeiting certification: For home appliances such as water dispensers that require additional accessories and consumables during use, it is inevitable that you will be upset if you accidentally buy counterfeit accessories and consumables. Home appliance manufacturers can embed NFC anti-counterfeiting tags in accessories and consumables. When they are installed on the host, the host's NFC card reader can immediately identify their authenticity, and can automatically complete the configuration of accessories and consumables. It can also monitor their status during use and promptly remind users to maintain and replace them.

User identification: If this personalized NFC tag is "attached" to the user, then the home appliance can be personalized according to the user's preferences. For example, on a treadmill shared by a family, different users can complete the NFC data exchange between the two by touching the treadmill with their mobile phones (or sports bracelets), allowing the treadmill to preset parameters to the mode they are used to.

Maintenance and upgrade: What should you do if your home appliance breaks down? The first choice is to call the customer service hotline to schedule a maintenance engineer to come to your home, but this is a high cost for both the home appliance manufacturer and the user. If NFC is used, the user can read the device failure information by placing the NFC phone close to the device, and then transmit the information to the home appliance manufacturer for diagnosis and subsequent maintenance plan. If the device is a node device with an I2C interface, the firmware can also be updated and upgraded through the NFC communication channel.

In order to fully realize the dream of NFC in smart home applications, various NFC technology manufacturers have done a lot of homework in product design. In addition to the most basic NFC solution form of "card reader + tag", various manufacturers have also integrated microcontrollers, expansion interfaces and other functions with NFC to meet the needs of a wider range of applications.

Figure 2: Different NFC products correspond to different application development requirements (Source: NXP)

At the same time, in order to further narrow the "distance" between NFC and target applications, more and more NFC solutions have been developed, including verified hardware solutions and related software resource libraries. On this basis, users only need to undergo secondary development to quickly form commercial NFC products and solutions.

Figure 3: The NFC reader module solution developed by Avnet can quickly integrate NFC technology into smart meters and other applications to add the required mobile payment functions (Image source: Avnet)

Figure 4: System block diagram of the NFC reader module solution developed by Avnet (Image source: Avnet)

At present, the application of NFC in smart home seems to be still some distance away from the critical point of market explosion. However, the popularity of NFC products and its good start in mobile payment have given people the confidence to "wait": do what needs to be done well, and leave the rest to time.