Teridian interface chips suit identification environments

Teridian Semiconductor Corp. has released three low-cost smart card interface ICs that are designed for use in conditional access, payment and identification environments. The 73S8024R, 73S8004R and 73S8010R ICs are mixed signal devices that provide a stable, low-noise interface compliant with the ISO-7816 standard between any host microcontroller and a smart card.
The 73S8024R and 73S8004R implement the control interface between card and host as dedicated digital I/Os, while the 73S8010R implements a standard I2C interface bus for interfacing with the host.

All three devices translate the digital signals from the host to analog signals recognized by the smart card, and vice versa. They also provide a stable 3V or 5V VCC power source to the smart card from an on-chip low drop-out voltage regulator, yielding a 10 times improvement in noise performance over existing solutions in the marketplace that employ step-up dc-dc converters.

Product Manager Jean-Christophe Doucet, said, "Our new smart card interface ICs set a new noise and current performance standard in the marketplace and enable the high frequency operation (up to 20MHz) and high current draw (at least 90mA) that match the performance demanded by 32-bit processor cards or SAMs (Secure Access Modules) that are becoming increasingly common in the smart card world."