Samsung's smart card ICs for banking security obtained the People's Bank of China 3.0 (PBOC 3.0) certification, which is a requirement by the Bank and an essential validation for financial use in China. Through works with Chinese smart card manufacturers, Samsung finished the certification process for the latest version of PBOC, which was officially published in February, 2013. Samsung is now ready to supply the security ICs to Chinese banks, which are going through an industry-wide technical transition from the magnetic stripe bank cards to IC bank cards.

The lineup of PBOC certified Samsung smart card ICs - S3CT9KC, S3CT9KA and S3CT9PA - is based on Samsung's proprietary core technology, SecuCalm, and is fabricated with the company's 90-nanometer (nm) process.

With 80 or 40 kilobytes (KB) of EEPROM storage options, the S3CT9xx product family offers hardware cryptography algorithms, 3-DES and AES, and a hardware cryptography engine, Tornado 2Mx2, for RSA and ECC. By fully supporting both contact and contactless interfaces, the S3CT9xx products will be compatible with electronic payment readers that have either of the interfaces.

The S3CT9xx products have also been validated by the Common Criteria EAL 5+ certification and EMVCo's global standards for their high security levels.

In addition to their adoption in banking cards, Samsung's new security smart card ICs are also expected to be applied in public transportation smart cards and e-government programs such as ePassports and electronic ID cards. Samsung's security ICs allow banks to apply multiple features in a single card.