Filed late last month with FCC, the RC-S620/U FeliCa Contactless IC Card Reader/Writer indicates that Sony truly moving along with introducing FeliCa technology to the USA. FeliCa is a contactless RFID smart card system by Sony, primarily used in electronic credit/debit cards (aka “digital wallet”), train passes, and more in Asia. The name stands for Felicity Card, and we’ve written about this wireless card technology several times before. Like every other FeliCa card writer, the RC-S620 uses Manchester coding at 212/424 kbit/s in the 13.56 MHz range. A proximity of 20mm or less is required for communication. FeliCa is externally powered, i.e. it does not need a battery to operate. The card uses power supplied from the special FeliCa card reader when the card comes in range. When the data transfer is complete, the reader will stop the supply of power.
The RC-S620 (product specifications PDF via FCC), which is USB powered, also has NFC technology, which is being adopted aggressively for a wide range of applications, including not only e-money and fare payment systems, as with FeliCa, but also consumer electronic products. When fully implemented, it should be possible to develop NFC systems that will contactlessly transfer pictures from a digital camera while also charging the camera’s battery, or transfer schedule data to a PDA simply by touching the device. We just found out about this technology today – sounds alot like TransferJet, but at a much lesser bandwidth.
The RC-620 is also compatible with mobile phones with a built-in Mobile FeliCa IC chip (on which the Mobile FeliCa OS Version 2.0 is running). Does this mean that FeliCa could be coming to cell phones in the United States? Hard to tell at this point who will be buying up these RC-S620 modules (or where they will be installed), but we’re excited about this coming stateside and hope that a mobile provider and bank pony up and get this rolling.
Check this post later today for an informative video we found about FeliCa technology.
