Princeton Junction

It’s tricky dealing in the technology-enabled card market today. The products are becoming more and more sophisticated and specialized, and the distributors selling them have to follow suit. Here is a brief glossary, courtesy of the Smart Card Alliance, Princeton Junction, N.J., of some perhaps less familiar types of cards currently in play: • Cryptographic smart cards—Equipped with specialized cryptographic hardware that allows algorithms such as RSA, these advanced smart cards are often used for digital signatures and secure identification. • Memory card—Typically a smart card or any pocket-sized card with an embedded integrated circuit or circuits containing non-volatile memory storage components, and

True or false: Smart cards are the same as RFID cards. The correct answer is false, although many people use the terms synonymously. Headquartered in Princeton Junction, N.J., the Smart Card Alliance (SCA) is a not-for-profit association working to promote understanding and widespread application of the technology. Randy Vanderhoof, executive director, acknowledged the tendency to categorize contactless smart card technology as RFID causes confusion and complicates efforts to educate the marketplace. “It has become a large market with diverse products and capabilities. There is no singular definition that satisfies all the different technical variations, form factors and uses,” he observed. What’s What RFID uses