Concept of Plastic Smart Card

A brief history of the plastic smart card

Plastic smart cards were first introduced in France. In the mid-1970s, the French company Roland Moreno adopted the method of installing an embedded memory chip on a plastic card with the size of a credit card, and was the first to successfully develop an IC memory card. After more than 20 years of development, a plastic smart card in the true sense (that is, a plastic card IC card with embedded micro-controller chip installed on it) was successfully developed in 1997.

The structure of a plastic smart card mainly includes three parts:

(1) Establish a plastic smart card programming device. 

The programming device is used in the plastic smart card development process. It describes the initialization and personalization of the card from the level of the plastic smart card layout to create all the required data.

(2) The agent that handles the plastic smart card operating system. 

Including the plastic smart card operating system and the accessory part of the plastic smart card application program. The agent is highly portable and can be integrated into chip card reader devices or personal computers and client/server systems.

(3) Acting as an agent of the plastic smart card application program interface.

It helps to manage different plastic smart card agents, and also provides an independent interface of the plastic smart card type to the application. Since the plastic smart card has an embedded micro-controller chip, it can store and process data. The value on the card is protected by the user's personal identification number (PIN), so only the user can access it. The multifunctional plastic smart card is embedded with a high-performance CPU, and is equipped with its own basic software (OS), which can freely add and change functions like a personal computer. This plastic smart card is also equipped with a "self-explosion" device. If criminals want to open the IC card to illegally obtain information, the content on the software in the card will automatically disappear immediately.