Smart car keys and mobile phones

By: Drivers.com staff
Date: Friday, 31. July 2009

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"We're working on an intelligent key that communicates via NFC with the car and other devices such as a mobile phone or PC," said NXP Semiconductor marketing vice president Willem Bulthuis in a recent interview with Puja Pankhania of Telematics Update magazine.

The key uses Near Field Communication, which is a short-range high frequency wireless technology, to enable data exchange between devices such as PDAs and mobile phones over very short distances (a few inches or about 10 centimeters).

An NFC-enabled key, explained Bulthuis, could carry out such functions as remembering the coordinates of your car when you park it and transferring them to your mobile phone, or remembering whether you had locked your car doors or not.

Other applications of the intelligent key, said Bulthuis, would be saving maintenance data or capturing diagnostic information from your car to be transferred to your office PC and then perhaps to your dealer, who could then remind you about servicing deadlines.

Willem Builthuis is Vice President for automotive global marketing and sales for NXP, a European-based leader in the semiconductor industry. The company was founded by Philips more than 50 years ago and has 37,000 employees working in more than 20 countries. It posted sales of USD 6.3 billion in 2007.

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