The NFC Forum has signed a liaison agreement with AIM and expanded an existing relationship with the Japan Automotive Software Platform and Architecture (JasPar) organization, in a bid to boost the use of NFC in IoT and automotive applications.
The AIM liaison agreement focuses on the IoT market, furthering an NFC Forum objective to partner with complimentary technologies to use NFC to help connect, commission and control the predicted 36 billion IoT devices in use by 2020, the Forum said in a statement.
Under the agreement, AIM and the NFC Forum will work together to mutually educate the market and help build the ecosystem for NFC for IoT and industrial applications.
Meanwhile, the agreement with JasPar will see the two groups to work more closely together to expand the use of NFC in the automotive market. JasPar recently started a Digital Car Key group within the organization as a target application for NFC.
The Japanese automotive association and the NFC Forum will also jointly develop NFC automotive use cases and requirements, create non-technical documents and share technical documents and specifications.
“The IoT and automotive markets are rapid growth areas for NFC technology,” said Paula Hunter, executive director, NFC Forum. “The agreements with AIM and JASPAR are joint opportunities to work with new technologies and develop interoperability use cases to promote the use of NFC in IoT and automotive applications worldwide.”
In a separate announcement, the NFC Forum has released a candidate technical specification that is designed to enable a single antenna in the NFC-enabled device to be used to manage both NFC communications and wireless charging.
The Wireless Charging Candidate Technical Specification (WLC) makes it easier and more convenient to charge low-power IoT devices such as smart watches, fitness trackers, headsets and other consumer devices, the NFC Forum said.
“Our approach can help avoid the need for a separate wireless charging unit for small devices if the device includes an NFC communication interface,” said Paula Hunter, executive director at NFC Forum.
“For example, a Bluetooth headset which includes NFC technology for pairing could also use the NFC interface for wireless charging. In this case, the NFC antenna is used to exchange the pairing information and to transfer power.”
The WLC was published as a candidate specification allowing the industry to review the document before this specification is validated, the NFC Forum said.