Printed RFID NFC Tags in Mobile Payment

printed rfid nfc tags in mobile payment

NFC technology is pretty common these days and features in most high-end smartphones. As well as phone to phone communication, small little NFC tags can also be used to store and transfer information. You will probably  have noticed small NFC tags next to advertisements near bus stops, stickers in shops, or may have even come across the clever idea of using NFC enabled business cards.

These tags can store wide ranges of information, from short lines of text, such as a web address or contact details, to links to apps in the Google Play Store. It’s a quick and efficient way to quickly push information to your phone and these little tags can replace bar and QI codes, and could even be used instead of Bluetooth in some cases. So here’s how it works.

How it works? 
NFC tags are passive devices, which means that they operate without a power supply of their own and are reliant on an active device to come into range before they are activated. The trade-off here is that these devices can’t really do any processing of their own, instead they are simply used to transfer information to an active device, such as a smartphone. 

In order to power these NFC tags, electromagnetic induction is used to create a current in the passive device. We won’t get too technical on this, but the basic principle is that coils of wire can be used to produce electromagnetic waves, which can then be picked up and turned back into current by a another coil of wire. This is very similar to the techniques used for wireless charging technologies, albeit much less powerful.