What is a smart card?
A. Smart Cards are the new, convenient way to pay for parking at meters throughout Greenwich. The size of a credit card, they are similar to a prepaid phone card, in that money is deducted each time you use your Smart Card. This is done via a microchip embedded in each card that tracks the amount of money you have left. With a Smart Card, you’ll never have to hunt for quarters when you want to park at a meter! They can currently be purchased in $10 denominations. For more information please call (203) 622-7730. Q.
A smart card is a device that includes an embedded integrated circuit that can be either a secure microcontroller or equivalent intelligence with internal memory or a memory chip alone. The card connects to a reader with direct physical contact or with a remote contactless radio frequency interface. With an embedded microcontroller, smart cards have the unique ability to store large amounts of data, carry out their own on-card functions (e.g., encryption and mutual authentication) and interact intelligently with a smart card reader. Smart card technology conforms to international standards (ISO/IEC 7816 and ISO/IEC 14443) and is available in a variety of form factors, including plastic cards, key fobs, watches, subscriber identification modules used in GSM mobile phones, and USB-based tokens. For the purposes of this FAQ, “card” is used as the generic term to describe any device in which smart card technology is used.
A smart card resembles a credit card in size and shape, but inside it is completely different. First of all, it has an inside — a normal credit card is a simple piece of plastic. The inside of a smart card usually contains an embedded microprocessor. The microprocessor is under a gold contact pad on one side of the card. Think of the microprocessor as replacing the usual magnetic stripe on a credit card or debit card. Smart cards are much more popular in Europe than in the United States. In Europe, the health insurance and banking industries use smart cards extensively. Every German citizen has a smart card for health insurance. Even though smart cards have been around in their modern form for at least a decade, they are just starting to take off in the United States. Magnetic stripe technology remains in wide use in the United States. However, the data on the stripe can easily be read, written, dele
A smart card is credit card-sized piece of plastic that contains a small computer, or microprocessor, and its own data storage, processing power and software. Smart cards provide data portability, security and convenience and can be used for many different applications. Today, smart card technology is not just used in the shape of a card either. Sometimes it is inside something else, like a USB token, passport or cell phone. In the United States, applications for smart card technology include: **U.S. electronic passports **Subscriber Identification Modules (SIMs) inside cell phones **Contactless payment cards, like MasterCard PayPass, Visa PayWave and Chase blink **Contactless transit fare cards **Employee badges, like those being issued to all U.S. federal government employees **Personal USB tokens for protected portable information storage and Internet or network security Smart cards have two different types of interfaces: contact and contactless. Contact smart cards are inserted int
Simple plastic card, just at the size of a credit card, with a microprocessor and memory embedded inside is a smart card. Beside its tiny little structure it has many uses and wide variety of applications ranging from phone cards to digital identification of the individuals. These application could be; identity of the customer, library card, e-wallet, keys to various doors, etc… And only one card can be issued to an end-entity for all these applications. Smart cards hold these data within different files, and , as you will read, these data is only visible to its program depending on the operating system of the card. These data files are arranged in a file system much like a Linux directory structure.
