BY JOSEPH A. NAUJOKAS, NAUJOKAS & ASSOCIATES,
ICMA STANDARDS REPRESENTATIVE
For those of you who missed the ICMA Spring Workshop in the U.S.,
Jerry Parsons of Mag Tek presented a paper on a new mag stripe standard
now under development. It is based on High Coercivity media and the
same size stripe width as a 3 Track existing mag stripe, but the new
mag stripe will be capable of carrying 17,000 bits of data, nearly 10
times as much as the existing standard stripe.
How can this be possible? First, the track width has been cut in half
to allow six tracks in the same space. Next, the recording density is
increased five times that of the existing Track 1. Then the existing
encoding technique, F2F is replaced by MFM which doubles the capacity.
Now with so much data that can be carried on the stripe, a data framing
technique is proposed that will minimize the data lost when one section
of the stripe is damaged.
The framing technique will also allow the use of an error correction
scheme, such as Reed Solomon, to reconstruct data lost by damaged magnetic
stripes. This technique was successfully demonstrated in the March meeting
of the ISO/IEC/JTC1/SC17 WG1 mag stripe standards working group.
While the existing high coercivity media will be suitable, coercivity
may be restricted to a maximum of 2750 Oersteds, and there will be more
stringent quality requirements.
One further basic change was made to eliminate the definition of character
sets in the mag stripe standard to allow wider use in all applications.
It then becomes a data storage carrier much like a floppy disc.
None of this is new technology. It is merely applying existing technologies
to the magnetic stripe. While the mag stripe industry knew this was
possible for some time, the need for such a storage device was questionable.
The introduction of biometrics in ID technology has changed all that.
The Passport Standards Working Group requested the Mag Stripe WG to
develop a mag stripe standard that would allow storage of the biometric
data in a low cost efficient medium. Other applications such as drivers'
licenses and health care cards have come forward that also require more
data storage capacity.
It also will be possible to devote 1, 2, or 3 of the tracks for traditional
mag stripe data, which allows these tracks to be read by standard mag
stripe terminals in use today. The terminal will require updating to
be able to read the new high density tracks. Of course, devoting some
track(s) to the existing standard format will reduce the amount of data
that can be stored.
The WD of the standard is close to being ready for National Body ballot
as a CD. I expect that the standard will be technically finalized by
this time next year. The new standard designation is ISO/IEC 7811-7.