ST, Wasion deliver NFC-enabled power meters

STMicroelectronics has teamed up with China smart meter provider Wasion Group锟絫o deliver NFC-enabled post-pay power meters for deployment in the municipal grid of ChongQing, China. Wasion's meters use ST's NFC technology to enable convenient mobile payments of electricity bills with uncompromised data security.

ST's NFC system-in-package solution uses the international-standard 13.56MHZ RF interface adopted for NFC mobile phones worldwide. With Wasion's post-pay NFC power meters, consumers can use their NFC mobile phones to read smart meters via a contactless RF interface and send the encrypted data over the 2G/3G mobile network to the banking back-end to complete the electricity-fee transaction.

The system-in-package contains an NFC contactless interface (ST21NFCA) and a Secure Element (ST33F1M). The ST33F1M Secure Element embeds a secure operating system from Gemalto, based on Global Platform GP2.2/Java3.0.1, which is among the most advanced secure NFC payment platforms available in the market. The Java OS and Java applets provide a secure environment for the application to run and store metering data. With this level of security, the same solution can also be used for pre-pay contract users. The system-in-package is used along with an STM32 MCU and ST's EEPROM in Wasion's power meters.

The NFC-enabled power meter prototype has been available since January 2012 and volume production will begin in June 2012.