New Evaluation Board from STMicroelectronics Simplifies NFC Deployment in Wearables, IoT, Smart Cities, and Other Emerging Applications

Geneva / 30 Jul 2015

Accelerating the design of wearables, product identification, and smart-city applications for the Internet of Things (IoT), the new CLOUD-ST25TA evaluation board is based on the ST25TA02K chip from STMicroelectronics. It contains everything that engineers need to start adding an NFC interface to any kind of electronic device, from Bluetooth audio products and wearable devices to NFC posters and business cards.

The board is based on the ST25TA family that consists of a range of NFC Forum Type 4 tag chips that boast the industry’s widest range of integrated EEPROM memory size (512-bit up to 64-kbit) along with the most robust memory performance, with data retention times of up to 200 years, the industry’s widest operating temperature range (-40°C / +85°C), and an endurance of 1 million erase-write cycles. These devices are ideal for Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth pairing, smart posters (e.g. storing URLs or triggering apps), Vcards containing contact details and ID photo, product identification, asset tracking, and a host of other consumer, industrial, and IoT applications.

Other key features of the ST25A family include:

Best-in-class RF performance that works effectively with ultra-small antennae, using a 50pF internal RF tunable capacitance.
Tiny UFDFPN5 (1.7 x 1.4 mm) package, making the devices ideal for wearables and other IoT applications where board space is at a premium.
Optional password protection to guarantee data security in the tag.
A 20-bit event counter that allows analytics to track the level of interest in the information contained in the tag.
A general-purpose output asserted every time an event occurs in the RF field. This output can be used as a wake-up signal for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and it does not require any external components.

An easy-access development platform with full native NFC support, the ST25TA-CLOUD evaluation board is available now at a price of US$5.