How
smart can you get?
Perhaps one of the most commonly
quoted technological cliches of recent times has been to describe
smart cards as a solution in search of a problem. Everyone agreed
that the technology was pretty clever but no one was terribly
certain what
to do with it. Today it’s different - dramatically different.
Numerous schemes have progressed beyond the ‘pilot’
stage. Many governments around the world are now introducing
smart cards for a range of applications that spreads from road-tolls
to issuing retirement pensions.
In 1997, some 900 million smart
cards were manufactured. Although around 740 million were simple
‘memory’ cards - like the 650 million or so disposable
telephone cards - some 168 million were true long-term-use smart
cards containing personalised information related to a myriad
of commercial and industrial applications. The vast majority
of these cards, over 90%, were destined for use in the European
marketplace. In fact, Europe was the birthplace of the smart
card and is probably the most advanced area in adopting it.
Europe Leads
the Field
In Spain, Germany, Belgium
and the Czech Republic smart cards are being used for health-care
so that medical information about an individual is stored on
the card and can be accessed by medical professionals and pharmacists.
France plans to issue smart cards to all its 57 million citizens
by the millennium, as replacement for the social security insurance
paper forms, of which some 850 million are issued each year.
Doctors’ surgeries will be equipped with a two-card reader.
When the patient visits they simply present their card to the
doctor, who inserts it into the reader along with doctor’s
own card. The patient can authorise payment for treatment by
keying in their bank account pin-code and the doctor can access
and update the health record information contained in the card.
Introducing the scheme does not come cheap with estimated costs
of around FFr 20 billion, but the French reckon that they will
save FFr 2.5 million each year enabling a payback for the scheme
within 9 years even with the issue of free cards.
Smart card technology is at
the heart of the ubiquitous GSM mobile telephone, enabling you
to store telephone numbers, timetables and other useful tools.
Some 69 million GSM smart cards were sold during 1997. Most European
banking cards are
smart cards - accounting for around 50 million units in 1997.
Gemplus, the pioneering French smart card manufacturer reckon
that the market is growing by 30% each year and will continue
to do so for the next 10 years or so. This means that in 2003
- just five years from now - close to 4.5 billion cards will
be produced, with some 750 million of these being the long-term-use
micro-processor cards containing personalised
information that can be re-programmed or updated. Assuming this
forecast is correct, and that Europe continues to lead the world
in smart-card use, then by 2003 every man, woman and child in
the European Union will have at least one and probably two personalised
smart-cards lurking in their wallet, handbag or whatever.
All Myth
and Magic?
There is, however, still a
great deal of, mystique and incredibly confusing technical jargon
surrounding smart cards. In fact, smart card technology is relatively
simple - after all there is nothing desperately complicated about
a microprocessor set in a piece of plastic. Historically smart
card technology has been Iimited by the single chip microprocessor
technology. An added constraint is the physical size of the chip
which must not exceed 25mm square. Early developers were stuck
with a program size of 2 or 3 Kbytes. Distinguishing between
an operating system and an application function was simply not
possible, added to which, no software tools were available. The
consequences were a whole raft of proprietary systems, which,
invariably, were
incompatible with each other. Not dissimilar, in many ways, to
the early days of the PC at the beginning of the l980s - when
CP/M, MS-DOS, Pro-DOS and a variety of other proprietary operating
systems made compatibility and networking an absolute nightmare.
Today, owing as much to the
work of the open systems movement as to Mr Gates, most computers
can talk to each other with very little difficulty. Standardisation
was the key that enabled this to happen within a relatively short
splice of time.
Smart cards
get standards
Standardisation in the smart
card arena is now one of the main driving forces in opening up
their market potential. A whole range of standard specifications
are now available for the various components and technologies
that make up a smart card - although several have yet to be formally
ratified by the International Standards Organisation (ISO). The
most important smart-card standard is ISO 7816. This deals with
such aspects as the physical dimensions of the card, how the
card makes contact with its reader, communication protocols,
inter-industry commands for interchange, application identification
and inter-industry data elements. With customers demanding compliance
as a pre-requisite of purchase, all current smart card suppliers
are being forced to comply to ISO 7816 - moving smart card technology
out of its proprietary world and leading to even greater demand
and variety of application.
Although industry standards
have played an enormous role in opening up the potential for
smart cards, a more mundane problem still exists - that of technology
itself.
Technology
stagnation
More than 15 years ago, the
microprocessors used in PCs were 8 bit CISC (complex instruction-set
computing) chips. Microprocessors have since progressed to 16
and 32 bit devices and we are now moving toward 64-bit architectures.
There has been no comparable evolution for the microprocessors
used in smart cards. Today’s smart cards still use the same
8-bit microcontroller core as in the fist generation microprocessors
- a design that is over 15 years old! Over the last ten years,
semiconductor technology has provided much more memory space
for smart card chips and much -work has been done to develop
powerful tools. However, it still takes around 12 months to develop
and test a new card for a customer. With ever increasing market
demand and smart cards now being viewed as providing a competitive
edge, this is no longer acceptable. A radical re-engineering
of the smart card technology is needed - step in the Open Microprocessor
systems Initiative OMI).
Smart cards
and OMI - a great leap forward
OMI was established in 1993
as part of the European Union’s Esprit Programme ((European
Strategic Programme for Research and development in Information
Technology). OMI’s vision is for Europe to have a credible,
word-class standing in the provision of microprocessor systems
and related technology - in other words, the hardware and the
software of an embedded system which are, of course, the basic
technology components of every smart card.
Early in 1994 OMI funded a
research and development project aimed at producing a platform
for a new generation of microprocessors for portable electronic
devices, including smart cards. The project, known as CASCADE
and led by Gemplus with support from companies such as Dassault
in France, Nokia in Finland and Advanced RISC Machines in the
UK, set out to develop a new chip architecture based on a 32-bit
RISC (reduced instruction set computing) chip which could be
adapted for portable electronic applications including smart
cards. As well as the architecture for the hardware platform,
the project also set about developing a secure, multi-tasking
operating system that would conform to, existing and emerging
industry standards and
software development tools specifically for the new architecture.
The results of the project
provide a quantum leap forward in smart card processing power.
The RISC processor chosen as the basis for the new architecture
was an ARM processor some 100 times more powerful than the chips
used in current smart cards. Texas Instrument are now manufacturing
the new chips under licence. The first smart cards containing
the new processor became available at the end of 1997.
The brave
new software world
The availability of a very
powerful new processor for smart cards enabled the project to
develop a true operating system whose function is to manage the
smart card hardware resources for an application in much the
same way as the operating system on a PC works. This capability
significantly opens up the world of smart card application development,
which is no longer constrained by the limitations of the old
8-bit architecture and no operating system. The project has developed
a powerful multi-service operating system. The software comes
in three parts - a virtual machine (with some native functions
such as cryptography), a multi-service operating system with
a well defined application programming interface (API), and Applets'
which are specific to one application and to one customer.
How smart
can you get ?
Now the smart card issuer can
develop the smart card applications (the Applet) they want in
a high-level recognisable computer programming language. They
can implement the Applet on cards provided by different manufacturers.
They can modify the functions of the card AFTER its personalisation
and issuing. They can add new Applets or erase old Applets -
which means the issuer can change the way they do business with
their customers without reissuing cards. Perhaps most significantly,
this new technology opens the door to true, flexible multi-application
schemes on a single card. A myriad of similar platforms are likely
to emerge during the next few years to take advantage of these
new market opportunities. OMI and the CASCADE project team can
be deservedly proud to have laid the foundations.
0MI Bulletins are occasional
leaflets published by the OMI PROMISE project.
0MI,The Open Microprocessor systems Initiative, is a programme
set up by the European Information Technology industry and the
European Commission in the framework of Esprit the European strategic
Programme for Research and Development in Information Technology. |
