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A Standards Update - AIDC Card Standards Quick Links
What is RFID Welcome to this edition of a regular column about standards in the Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC) industry. This column will be updated regularly to keep you current on news of standards and their impact on the industry.
In the last column we discussed bar code standards, in this column we will take a look at card standards. We have discussed the difference between technology and application standards, and we will try to look at both again in this article. The international home for card based standards is ISO/IEC JTC1/SC17 Cards and Personal identification. (For a better understanding of JTC1 see the previous articles). The details of the sub committee can be found at: http://www.sc17.com. This committee has various work groups that look at all aspects of the card based world. The working groups that function in this Sub Committee are:
As with bar code technology discussed in the last article, there is not just one source of standards and specifications for these technologies. If you are looking for a specification for an access control card, you will not find it here, though you may find a standard for a technology used on the card. You may find that no application standard exists for your need, or you may find that there is a defacto standard that has grown up in the industry that has never been committed to a formal standardization process. An example of this might be Wiegand technology used in the access control market. There are no standards for Wiegand published by ANSI or ISO, but it has become a defacto standard in the access control field for many years. You will need to talk to the access control manufacturers to determine what is the standard. Another area that has had little of no standardization until recently is the "non banking" side of the magnetic stripe market. Organizations using magnetic stripe technology relied on parts of the standards produced by SC17 to give them some area to fall back on, but they really did not use the full ISO document to encode their cards. These applications often do not wish to be tied to a standard that is used so extensively as the one used on banking cards. Their desire for difference may be as simple as an encoding format difference, or it may be as complicated as different performance characteristics for the magnetic stripe.
Next time we will look at RFID technology standards. Table of SC17 documents:
Back to Table of Contents
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In the coming articles, we will try to
educate you on the various technologies covered under the AIDC
umbrella as well as bring news of the standardization process
and its progress. If you have news about standards that you want
to share, or questions you want to ask, send them to
steve@hightechaid.com and we will try to incorporate them into
the next column.
The
table shows the work items assigned to SC17 along with the
18 standards (many of which are multi-part) that they are
responsible for. As you will see, the words "cards and
personal identification" cover everything from credit cards
to access control cards, to document storage, to passports,
to driver licenses. This broad range of activities has kept
this sub committee and its work groups busy for some time,
with new documents and revisions of documents constantly
being worked on.
As a result of these requests for a "different" type of
magnetic stripe card, AIM was asked to create a standard for a
stripe that would allow the specification of the performance of
the a stripe, yet would be easily testable by the user
organization without the need for expensive equipment. AIM
released the document "Effective Magnetic Parameters of Magnetic
Stripes on Media" in 1990, and recently revised it before
submission to ANSI for acceptance as an ANSI standard (ANSI/AIM
MS-1) due to be published late in 2000. A brief summary of the
document can be found on the AIM web site.