All of the 80 million people in Germany now carry health care smart cards. Schlumberger, a major smart card manufacturer, predicts that, by the year 2001, more than 250 million patients In Europe and Asia will have health care smart cards. France will soon start using smart cards that talk to special "pay poles". Their public transportation system has ordered 15 million "contactless" smart cards that only need to be aimed at a pole for verification.

1. Memory cards
2. Processor cards
3. Electronic purse cards
4. Security cards
5. JavaCard

Memory cards contain only memory chips that can be preloaded and depleted, but their operational capabilities cannot be modified after cards have been produced. Clearly, these simplest read-only memory (with no processor) "stored-value cards" are not very "smart." The smarts come from a terminal, or in the case of phone cards, from the telephone. Such protected memory cards are used for stored-value (credit and debit), but not for security. The most common use of such cards today is for prepaid phone cards. The memory in 1997 was up to 20 Kbytes (KB). In 1998, the memory increased to 64K (e.g., ST19SF64 from SGS Thomson). Today, it is 1 MB.

Unlike the memory cards, the smart cards have embedded within them a processor and often a cryptographically enhanced co-processor. As shown in Fig. 4, the standard smart card microcontroller contains a CPU and blocks of memory including RAM, ROM, and some sort of nonvolatile memory (usually EEPROM). Today's smart card controller typically includes an 8-bit CPU (such as the Motorola 68HC05), 128 to 780 bytes of RAM, 4 to 20 KB of ROM, 1 to 16 KB of EEPROM on a single die, and (optionally) an on-chip hardware encryption module. There are plans for 32-bit RISC machines. Many chips use 0.6 to 0.8 µm geometries and die area of less than 25 mm squared.

Fig. 4. Architecture of a standard smart-card embedded microcontroller.

Cryptographically enabled smart cards, such as used by Netscape, will have a CPU, an advanced cryptographic coprocessor, EE-PROM, RAM, and run at 5 MHz. The advance of the new crypto cards is that they enable public key encryption, whereas older smart card technology could do cryptographic functions but it was slow (and used what is called private key encryption, which used only one key). Crypto smart cards can be configured to prevent "sequence attacks" in which the card is disabled if a PIN (personal identification number) is entered beyond a certain number of tries. They are still a small proportion of the overall market for smart cards.

1. contact,
2. contactless, and
3. hybrid (combi).

Contact smart cards need to be inserted into smart card readers, which touch a conductive module on the surface of the card. Data, algorithm, and other information are transmitted via the physical contacts.

Contactless smart cards, on the other hand, make use of an electromagnetic signal and an antenna embedded within each card to create the interaction between the card and the card reader. The radio frequencies employed also provide the card with its power source. These nonbattery-powered cards need to come within 2 to 3 inches of the card reader to be powered. "Fast card" interfaces, such as those used by transportation fare cards, have greatly benefited from the contactless interface, which allows a customer to move the card near the device, instead of inserting and removing a card, which can slow down lines.

Hybrid smart card (also commonly referred to as combi smart cards) are dual-chip cards; with each chip having its respective contact and contactless interface, not connected to each other inside the card. Strictly speaking, the combi cards are different from hybrids in that they carry only a single chip that has both contact and contactless interfaces, either of which can communicate between chip and card reader.

• Smart Telephone Cards - A timer deducts your balance dynamically.
• Electronic Wallet - Replacing coins and paper money.
• Passports - The card acts as the repository for tickets and vouchers.
• Keys - Storage of security keys, passwords and access.
• Medical Records - Repository of medical history and insurance information.
• TV Top Terminals - Key to controlling access to TV programming.
• Food Stamps - Eliminate paper and allows tracking of every dime.

• ISO 7816 series, part 1 to 10 Standard
  describes the lowest-level interface to a contact smart card. It is at this level that data bytes are transferred between card reader and card. The standard ISO-7816 defines the size of the card, the physical characteristics of the plastic, including the temperature range and flexibility, position of the electrical contacts and how the microchip communicates with the outside world. It also defines various commands such as file selection, file reading and writing, file searching, file operations, identification, authentication, file management, program execution, and special instructions. An example of the handshaking protocol is shown in Fig. 5.
  

  Fig. 5. A smart-card handshaking protocol.
  

• ISO 14443 Standard
  describes the contactless smart cards.
• PC/SC -- the standard for communicating with smart cards connected to Win3.1/Win95/NT machines.
• OCF -- an all-Java interface for communicating with smart cards from a Java environment. (Soon OCF will allow developers to write to OCF and perform the translation, so there will be no need to write to PC/SC.)
• JavaCard -- describes the JavaCard and what it supports.

• Mondex -- digital cash that uses smart cards only. The Mondex approach does not allow cash to exist outside of the card.
• VisaCash -- debit card that keeps track of the cards on the server.
• Proton -- another form of E-cash.
• MPCOS-EMV -- general-purpose card that lets you implement your own type of currency or token.

• Giesecke & Devrient GmbH,
• Bull,
• Gemplus,
• Hewlett-Packard,
• Schlumberger,
• Solaic, and
• Siemens Nixdorf,

as well as industry giants

• IBM and
• Microsoft.

• SGS Thomson,
• Siemens, and
• Motorola.

Notice that in January 1999, Motorola sold its smart-card chip business (the Smart Information Transfer, SIT) to Atmel, a San Jose, California-based maker of microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal nonvolatile memory, and radio-frequency semiconductors.

• Protected memory cards - 25 cents (U.S.)
• Microprocessor - $3-$4
• With cryptographic co-processor - $6-$7

For the end user, a crypto smart card ends up being between $12 and $15.

• Datakey,
• Chrysalis-ITS,
• Litronic Corporation, and
• Fisher International

Litronic has

• "dumb pass through" readers (for $49);
• "PIN (personal identification numbers) pass protect mode" keyboard readers; and
• "PIN pass protect mode readers with microcontrollers," ($79).