NXP Semiconductors announced that Canada’s South Coast British Columbia Transportation Authority (TransLink) has adopted its MIFARE technology platform for Vancouver’s public transport system.

Vancouver is introducing the Compass Card, which will enable passengers to enjoy convenient and secure transactions across buses, sky trains and ferries using just one contactless smart card. In addition, passengers can add travel products or values to their Compass Card at vending machines, online, by phone, or at a walk-in customer service centers.

The new MIFARE DESFire EV1-based transport scheme including NXP’s infrastructure solutions is currently being installed. The open architecture platform is based on open global standards for both air interfaces and cryptographic methods. In addition to offering data transfer rates of up to 848 kbit/s, MIFARE DESFire utilizes a triple DES, 3K DES, and AES hardware cryptographic engine for securing the data on the smartcards and data during transmission.

Further, the MIFARE DESFire platform enables seamless extensions of ticketing solutions on banking cards or on NFC-enabled mobile devices both working with NXP’s SmartMX high security microcontroller technology.