NXP Semiconductors announced that Canada’s South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority (TransLink) has adopted its MIFARE technology platform for Vancouver’s public transport system. With the introduction of NXP’s MIFARE technology, TransLink can quickly roll out a reliable and secure contactless service across the entire infrastructure to further accelerate use of public transportation in the smart city of Vancouver.
NXP Semiconductors announced that Canada's South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority (TransLink) has adopted its MIFARE technology platform for Vancouver's public transport system. With the introduction of NXP's MIFARE technology, TransLink can quickly roll out a reliable and secure contactless service across the entire infrastructure to further accelerate use of public transportation in the smart city of Vancouver.
Ranked among the world′s top 5 cities of Mercer′s Quality Living Ranking for four years, Vancouver is pursuing a Green City Plan to address urban challenges including the optimization of transportation over a 30 year period. To achieve its Green Transportation goal of accomplishing 50 percent of all trips by foot, bicycle or public transportation, Translink asked US systems integrator Cubic to create an efficient, secure and future-proof transit system powered by NXP's MIFARE technology.
Vancouver is introducing the Compass Card, which will enable passengers to enjoy fast, convenient and secure transactions across buses, sky trains and ferries using just one contactless smart card. In addition, passengers can add travel products or values to their Compass Card at vending machines, online, by phone, or at a walk-in customer service centers. The new MIFARE DESFire EV1-based transport scheme including NXP‘s infrastructure solutions is currently being installed.
"Vancouver has identified smart contactless ticketing as a key way to expand the appeal and convenience of its citywide transportation network. Its selection of MiFare DESFire as the technology to deliver this further expands NXP's footprint in smart cities around the world. ABI Research forecasts the consumption of secure smart card tickets in transportation to grow by 86 percent by the end of 2017", said John Devlin, group director security and ID with ABI Research.
"With urbanization being a significant megatrend in the 21st century, one of the greatest concerns for modern cities is ensuring that residents, vehicles and the economy itself is able to keep moving," says Ulrich Huewels, VP and GM, card security business line, NXP Semiconductors. "NXP solutions can address this challenge by optimizing public transport systems and individual traffic. NXP provides a complete end-to-end solution validated by more than 650 cities worldwide, and used by up to 1.2 billion passengers per day in megacities such as London, Moscow, Los Angeles or Beijing."
The MIFARE DESFire open architecture platform is based on open global standards for both air interfaces and cryptographic methods. In addition to offering data transfer rates of up to 848 kbit/s, MIFARE DESFire utilizes a triple DES, 3K DES, and AES hardware cryptographic engine for securing the data on the smartcards and data during transmission. Further, the MIFARE DESFire platform enables seamless extensions of ticketing solutions on banking cards or on NFC-enabled mobile devices both working with NXP's SmartMX high security microcontroller technology, leveraging NXP's leading position in the overall Identification market as well as in market segments such as transport ticketing, access, banking, e-government or NFC.