This chapter covers the key features of a smart card, its manufacturing process and the components of a smart-card system. It can be skipped by those who are already familiar with the technology and whose main interest is in advanced card types, and in particular in combining applications within a single card.

Appendix B also lists some further reading on smart-card technology in general.

What is a smart card?

Common features

A smart card is a card incorporating one or more integrated circuits within its thickness (see Figure 3.1). Smart cards are also often called chip cards or integrated circuit (IC) cards – these terms are interchangeable.

As we will see, the terms cover many cards that are not really ‘smart’ in the sense of being programmable, but the smartness comes from the way they are used as a part of a system.

Most smart cards meet the ISO 7810 standard (bank card size and thickness), but there are other standard card shapes, such as the ID-000 shape used by mobile telephone SIM cards. And some devices known as smart cards are not card-shaped at all – although this does raise a number of issues, as we will see in Chapter 6.

There are two main categories of smart cards, usually characterised as memory and microprocessor (or microcontroller) cards. The name microcontroller is technically more accurate since the chip includes memory, the serial interface and, possibly, more than one processor.