NFC Forum wants NFC to work at greater distances and charge faster

The NFC Forum wants to improve the NFC standard in the coming years, allowing devices to connect to each other at greater distances. This should make actions faster and easier. In addition, devices must be able to be charged faster via NFC.

The plans of the NFC Forum are part of a five-point roadmap that shows what the Forum is working on until 2028. One of those plans is to expand the reach of the NFC standard. NFC currently has a range of 5 mm, but the Forum is investigating a range of four to six times that. NFC may therefore have a range of 30mm.

“Even a small increase in range should make wireless transactions and actions faster and easier,” the Forum writes. The extra range would also mean that antennas would have to be matched less precisely for an action to work.

The Forum also has plans to charge devices via NFC with a maximum of 3W. Now that maximum is 1W. Charging via NFC has been possible since 2020; the idea is that this can be used to charge wireless earphones, smartwatches and other devices.

The Forum also talks about Multi Purpose Tap, which allows multiple actions to be performed with a single NFC tap. This should make ‘point-to-point delivery notes, loyalty identification and total-journey ticketing’ possible. The other two points are the ability to give NFC smartphones point-of-sale functionality, allowing a smartphone to be used as a mobile cash register, and the ability to provide more information via NFC about whether the scanned device can be recycled.

The Forum’s five plans are at various stages of development; some are still in the research phase, others are almost ready for specification. The Forum also talks about a timeframe of two to five years. The NFC Forum is an association of companies such as Apple, Google, Huawei, Infineon, NXP, Qualcomm, Sony and STMicroelectronics, and is working on the NFC specification.