Properties of a test bench to verify standard compliance of proximity transponders

Applications for public transport, electronic government or electronic banking based on ISO/IEC 14443, the standard for 13.56 MHz proximity contactless chip technology, require a huge number of integrated transponder chips, which up to now already exceeds 3 billion samples out in the field all over the world. It is a specific attribute of the passive RFID technology, that supply power, command reception and information transmission for the transponder chip is connected to one air interface. This requires to vary and test all parameters in combination, to be able to cover the real application case. We present a modular test bench allowing to combine higher layer protocol tests with analogue parameter variation in the contactless antenna arrangement as specified in the ISO/IEC 10373-6 test standard. As the HF near field technology cannot be covered just by relaxed UHF test methods but provides different and specific challenges, we focus on the specified antenna arrangement and explain in detail some of the properties and measurement concepts.