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Near Field Communication and all contactless technology

U.S.-based chip giant Texas Instruments today announced the industry’s first combo wireless chips incorporating NFC, with its WiLink 8.0 series, which are expected to be incorporated in smartphones and other mobile devices, such as tablets, ultrathin laptops and eBooks.

Germany-based Giesecke & Devrient has announced it has won a contract to serve as trusted service manager for Australia’s Commonwealth Bank for the bank’s contactless-mobile payment rollout.

NXP Semiconductors CEO Rick Clemmer said the chip maker has notched design wins for more than 130 handsets and tablets, giving it an “Intel-like” market share for the number of devices being designed with NFC chips.

Inside Secure today announced it has shipped 20 million NFC chips the past 12 months and said its chips will be used by a leading phone maker on a major mobile platform–as it seeks to build interest in its renewed IPO.

Taiwan-based chip maker MStar Semiconductor announced today it is supplying NFC technology to Russia-based phone maker Fly for one or more handsets for the European market to be released as early as next month.

Struggling video game maker Nintendo will incorporate NFC in its planned Wii U home video game console, including support for payments, the company’s president Satoru Iwata said today.

With the help of NFC technology, airline passengers will routinely tap their mobile phones to pass through security checkpoints and boarding gates by 2018, predicts major airline industry IT and communications services provider SITA.

NFC chip supplier Inside Secure has released a new version of its NFC software stack, as it seeks to break rival NXP Semiconductors’ dominance of the market for NFC chips in Android phones.

Japan’s second largest mobile operator, KDDI, said it would launch Japan’s first mobile NFC service late this month with the Samsung Galaxy S II–though the service will start out small because of the lack of phones that support both standard NFC and Japan's proprietary FeliCa technology, as well as Japan's nearly nonexistent infrastructure of standard contactless readers.

The SIMalliance trade group and GlobalPlatform standards organization say they are working on what they predict will become a “de-facto standard” for the way apps on NFC phones communicate with secure elements.

Visa has announced its first certifications of NFC phones, approving six models to run its contactless application, payWave, on SIM cards.