ISO/IEC 14443 Identification cards – Contactless integrated circuit cards – Proximity cards is an international standard that defines proximity cards used for identification, and the transmission protocols for communicating with it.

Standard

The standard is developed by ISO/IEC JTC 1 (Joint Technical Committee 1) / SC 17 (Subcommittee 17) / WG 8 (Working Group 8).

Parts

Types

Cards may be Type A and Type B, both of which communicate via radio at 13.56 MHz (RFID HF). The main differences between these types concern modulation methods, coding schemes (Part 2) and protocol initialization procedures (Part 3). Both Type A and Type B cards use the same transmission protocol (described in Part 4). The transmission protocol specifies data block exchange and related mechanisms: ISO/IEC 14443 uses the following terms for components:

Modulation methods

Type A cards use Amplitude-Shift Keying (ASK) with Modified Miller coding for Reader-to-Tag communication. For Tag-to-Reader communication, they use On-Off Keying (OOK) with Manchester code. Type B cards use ASK with NRZ coding for Reader-to-Tag communication and Binary Phase-Shift Keying (BPSK) with NRZ-L encoding for Tag-to-Reader communication. Both Type A and Type B cards only allow half duplex communication with a 106 kbit per second data rate in each direction. Data transmitted by the card is load modulated with a 847.5 kHz subcarrier. (847.5 kHz is one-sixteenth of the 13.56 carrier frequency provided by the reader.)

Physical size

Part 1 of the standard specifies that the card shall be compliant with ISO/IEC 7810 or ISO/IEC 15457-1, or "an object of any other dimension".

Notable implementations