Relationship between NFC and FeliCa

This figure shows the relationship between the different building blocks of the FeliCa technology and open standards.

Each component of FeliCa technology is described in the ISO/IEC communication standards, in the NFC Forum specifications defining the digital interface and half-duplex communication protocol, and in a Japanese industrial standard, JIS X 6319-4, which includes additional message formats and commands.

Open command-based applications that do not require the FeliCa cryptography can be fully developed using information from publicly available specifications. Major operating systems for smartphones, such as Android by Google and iOS by Apple, already support NFC functionality, and numerous applications (such as e-money viewers) created by everyday developers are available in the application markets.

An excellent feature of NFC is that it has a standardized modular structure, composed of wireless communication technologies, commands, and message formats. It offers very flexible development while hiding the complexity of these technologies, so application developers can easily create NFC applications.

The relationship between NFC and FeliCa can be summarized as follows: NFC-F and FeliCa share the same wireless communication technology, and FeliCa is a contactless IC card operating system based on the open NFC-F standards.