Semiconductor manufacturer STMicroelectronics and Wasion Group, a Chinese supplier of energy-metering products and solutions, are making available NFC-enabled post-pay power meters for the municipal grid of ChongQing, China. Wasion’s meters rely on ST’s Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology (view press release). The system-in-package solution uses the international-standard 13.56MHZ RF interface adopted for NFC mobile phones worldwide. Consumers will be able to use their NFC mobile phones to read smart meters via a contactless RF interface, and send the encrypted data over the 2G/3G mobile network to the banking back-end to complete the electricity-fee transaction. The same solution can be used for pre0pay contract users. The prototype has been available since January 2012 and volume production will begin in June this year.
The system-in-package contains an NFC contactless interface (ST21NFCA) and a Secure Element (ST33F1M) which embeds an operating system from Gemalto, based on Global Platform GP2.2/Java3.0.1. The Java OS and Java applets provide an environment for the application to run and store metering data. The system-in-package is used along with an STM32 MCU and ST’s EEPROM in Wasion’s power meters.
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