Tags - ISO14443

The ISO/IEC 14443 standard is a four-part international standard for contact-less smart cards operating at 13.56 MHz in close proximity (~10cm) with a reader antenna. This ISO standard describes the modulation and transmission protocols between card and reader to create interoperability for contact-less smart card products. There are two main communication protocols supported by the ISO/IEC 14443 standard, they are addressed as Type A and Type B. Most High Frequency (13.56 MHz) proximity tags are using these guidelines for their communication.

Near Field Communication devices implement native support for ISO14443-A tags. The NFC Forum refers to these tags as Type 1 and Type 2 tags. The Anti-Collision example describes the initialization messages used to set up a communication channel and to retrieve the identifier and supported features from a tag. During the anti-collision phase, three or four different frames are received from a tag (ATQA, UID, SAK and optional ATS).

The ATQA, SAK and ATS values can be used to identify the manufacturer, tag type and application. By the way, it's not recommended to rely on ATQA due to potential collision when more than one target are in the field.

A recommended document to identify MIFARE tags: MIFARE Type Identification Procedure

The following table shows a list of known tags and their anti-collision values (hexadecimal). Please contact us to help update and expand this list.