NFC Forum Publishes Its Newest Roadmap, with Plans for Dramatic Performance Improvements

The NFC Forum, the body behind the near-field communications (NFC) standard, has announced its roadmap for the coming years — promising an eightfold increase in data transfer rates, improved security, new wireless power features, and the ability to define multiple actions linked to a single "tap."

"NFC is a well-established and trusted foundational technology for countless devices and use cases across almost every market. To ensure that each of these deployments work in the seamless manner that customers expect from NFC, it is vital that the NFC Forum develops global standards that deliver true industry harmonization," says NFC Forum executive director Mike McCamon of the organization's roadmap. "Furthermore, to enable these standards to be adopted and applied at scale, it is equally important that all NFC stakeholders are aware of our plans and engage with NFC Forum in our development processes. This approach ensures future evolutions continue to align with both their current NFC use cases as well as their long-term ambitions."

Born from radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology, NFC allows otherwise-passive devices — as small as a sticker or an implant — to turn incoming radio waves into enough power to perform an operation and transmit the result. The NFC Forum was established by Nokia, Philips, and Sony, the latter two of which had partnered to create the underlying technology, in 2004, and has since become a standard feature in smartphones and tablets as well as task-specific devices like asset tracking systems.

The march of technological progress is unceasing, however, and the NFC Forum is keen to avoid accusations it is resting on its laurels. The company's latest roadmap hints at the work its members are undertaking to improve NFC capabilities — including the promise of a dramatic improvement in data transfer rates between devices, which could get up to eight times faster. Other planned improvements including security enhancements, including protections against relay-based attacks, new wireless power transmission features including higher charging rates, new digital key capabilities, and a "multi-purpose tap" function that would allow a single tap of an NFC reader against a tag to carry out several different actions depending on specific credentials.

"For more than 20 years, NFC Forum has empowered organizations to create innovative contactless experiences backed by intuitive, reliable and consistent NFC open standards," McCamon adds. "The active engagement in the evolution of NFC technology from an ever-increasing number of industries is testament to the clear value it provides to users globally. As we accelerate across the arc of contactless towards inevitable ubiquity, we encourage discussion and welcome new contributions from across the ecosystem."

More information is available on the NFC Forum website.