As a result of the success of its Open NFC™ commercial-grade NFC protocol stack, INSIDE Contactless, a provider of advanced, open-standard contactless chip technologies, is making the Open NFC protocol stack more widely available, with the full source code and full API documentation offered as a free download.

The Open NFC protocol stack brings proven, high quality, well-documented NFC software into the open source arena, providing a complete NFC middleware solution for mobile phones, embedded products and other devices. It benefits device makers, software developers as well as others in the mobile ecosystem in several ways, providing greater impetus to implement NFC solutions across a broad range of consumer products. Open NFC supports the trend toward open platforms in the mobile industry, and INSIDE welcomes contributions from the developer community.

Open NFC supports several levels of functionality, from low-level RF control to high-level NFC Forum tag handling, peer-to-peer communications as well as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi pairing, interactions with single-wire protocol SIMs and other secure elements, and compatibility with smart cards and RFID tags based on Felica, Mifare and ISO 14443 standards.

The source code for the core Open NFC version 3.5 software - including Android, Windows Mobile, Linux and Java (JSR-257) editions - and API documentation will be available on SourceForge.net starting May 15. More information on Open NFC can be found at www.insidecontactless.com/opennfc.