Smart card

A smart card, chip card, or integrated circuit card (ICC) is any pocket-sized card that has embedded integrated circuits. Smart cards are made of plastic, generally polyvinyl chloride, but sometimes polyethylene terephthalate based polyesters, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene or polycarbonate. Since April 2009, a Japanese company has manufactured reusable financial smart cards made from paper.

Smart cards can be either contact or contactless smart card. Smart cards can provide personal identification, authentication, data storage, and application processing. Smart cards may provide strong security authentication for single sign-on (SSO) within large organizations.

In 1968 and 1969 Helmut Gröttrup and Jürgen Dethloff jointly filed patents for the automated chip card. Roland Moreno patented the memory card concept in 1974. An important patent for smart cards with a microprocessor and memory as used today was filed by Jürgen Dethloff in 1976 and granted as USP 4105156 in 1978. In 1977, Michel Ugon from Honeywell Bull invented the first microprocessor smart card with two chips: one microprocessor and one memory, and in 1978, he has patented the self-programmable one-chip microcomputer (SPOM) that defines the necessary architecture to program the chip. Three years later, Motorola used this patent in its "CP8". At that time, Bull had 1,200 patents related to smart cards. In 2001, Bull sold its CP8 division together with its patents to Schlumberger, who subsequently combined its own internal smart card department and CP8 to create Axalto. In 2006, Axalto and Gemplus, at the time the world's top two smart card manufacturers, merged and became Gemalto. In 2008 Dexa Systems spun off from Schlumberger and acquired Enterprise Security Services business, which included the smart card solutions division responsible for deploying the first large scale public key infrastructure (PKI) based smart card management systems.

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