Texas Instruments (TI) has unveiled the RF360, a smart card IC platform to be developed to target the needs of the contactless government eID market.

The company says the RF360 is the smallest IC platform in the market which integrates its ultra-low power MSP340 microcontroller, advanced embedded Ferroelectric Random Access Memory (FRAM) and RF Analog Front-End (AFE) technologies.

The firms says its latest IC platform will provide fast chip transaction speeds, enabling governments to quickly produce a variety of passive eIDs such as ePassports and national ID cards.

TI says the IC platform design is based on a ‘grounds up’ design approach to a secure architecture that builds on its 130 nanometer (nm) chip process technology, 16-bit MSP430 microcontroller, non-volatile FRAM and AFE.

TI claims the new platform will provide both the memory and processing performance to accommodate current and future security and encryption requirements, such as Basic Access Control (BAC) and Extended Access Control (EAC). It adds that it will integrate advanced security countermeasures and is designed to meet the requirements of the EAL5+ security certification. It will also feature hardware co-processors on the chip which support RSA and Elliptic Curve cryptography as well as DES/Triple DES and AES.

The RF360 platform’s initial product will be a contactless smart IC, and will be manufactured at TI’s production facilities in Richardson, Texas. The firm says samples will be available from the middle of 2008.