STMicroelectronics simplifies the design of mobile payment features to help wearables achieve more

     STMicroelectronics has launched a new development ecosystem with a new mobile payment function with higher security, so that the current position of smart phones as the center of digital life will be challenged by wearable consumer electronics such as smart watches.

     The number of iot wearables in 2019 will exceed 500 million, representing a very large number of consumers who prefer to use secure mobile terminal payment methods that are more natural than credit cards or mobile phones. St's newly released development ecosystem helps product design engineers integrate support for payments, ticketing, digital access and loyalty-cards into wearable devices, leveraging the master microcontroller and hardware security unit to provide robust protection against malicious programs.

     The new ecosystem provides design engineers with all the components and tools they need to develop mobile payment applications on STM32 microcontrollers, not only to select the right product from ST's portfolio of secure units, but also to add the NFC antenna signal enhancement technology from ams(Austrian Microelectronics Company). ams, a supplier of high-performance analog chips and sensors, offers developers the most suitable ultra-small NFC antennas for wearable devices, and the mobile payment reference design jointly released by ST and ams in early 2015 successfully integrates the ultra-small antennas.

     Laurent Degauque, Marketing Director, Secure Microcontroller Product Division, STMicroelectronics, said: "Mobile payments with hardware security solutions are more attractive and will not only gain the attention of a wider range of end users, but will also promote the rapid growth of the wearables and mobile payments market. Our development ecosystem provides designers with all the components they need to integrate hardware and software, help customers bring new products to market quickly, and leverage our market-proven security unit chips to ensure customer product security meets the highest levels in the market."