ABI Research has ranked smart card and IC vendors within the government, health care and citizen ID markets and found Gemalto to be the top vendor in this field.

ABI’s assessment looked at market shares and vendor matrices for 2011 and the first half of 2012 to get its rankings. In the smart card vendor matrix, Gemalto placed first, eight points ahead of the next-ranked vendor.

In the IC vendor ranking, NXP came out a little more than one point ahead of Infineon to get first place in the overall rankings, though Infineon did rank highest in innovation.

The assessment looked at 21 companies measured against nine different criteria. The results are part of ABI’s Government & Healthcare ID Technologies Research Service.