ABS…Acrylonitrile
butadiene styrene, plastic material formed through injection molding,
used for some smart cards.
Chip…A piece of silicon etched
with an electronic circuit.
Coercivity…A measure of the strength
of a magnetic field. Fields are expressed as low or high by the
terms LoCo and HiCo.
Combi-card…Holding both contact
and contactless technology on one card.
Contact…A point of electrical
connection between a smart card and its external interface device.
Contact Card…Any card where information
is transferred to a reader via a series of contact points located
on the card.
Contactless Card…Smart
card which transfers data using radio frequency technology via
a transmitter and receiver.
Degaussing…Magnetic
stripe data erasure.
Digitizing…Conversion of non-textual
data to digital form.
Electronic Purse…Smart card stored
value program.
Embossing… Characters in relief
on the front surface of a card.
Encoding…Recording electronic
information on to a magnetic stripe.
Encryption…Transferring information
based on a key to make it intelligible to unauthorized parties.
GSM…Global System for Mobile
Communication, a widely used digital mobile phone standard.
Hologram…A flat optical image
which looks three-dimensional to the naked eye.
Holographic foil…the
foil used to carry embossed holographic images.
Initialization…Programming a
smart card chip with data that is the same for a batch of cards.
ID Card…Card which identifies
both the bearer and the issuer. All financial transaction cards
are ID cards.
ISO…International Standards Organization,
central body for formation and dissemination of industry standards
for all national standards bodies.
Issuer…An individual or organization
that issues identification cards to individual or corporate cardholders.
Lithography or Offset Printing…Most
common process for plastic card printing based on the concept
that oil and water are not compatible. The ink represents the
oil and the alkaline fountain solution represents the water. These
are the two main components which must interact during the printing
process, allowing the ink to adhere to the image area of a printing
plate while the fountain solution repels the ink from the non-image
area.
Lamination…Using
plates on a press to fuse the various layers of a plastic card
together.
Magnetic Stripe…The strip of
magnetic recording material on an ID card.
Multi-application Card…Smart
card that can handle a variety of applications.
Oersted…The unit of magnetic
coercive force used to define difficult of erasure of magnetic
material.
Off-line…A transaction via paper
or reader not connected to a central system.
On-line…A transaction on a terminal
permanently connected to a network that is on-line to the card
account.
Optical Card…Card with information
recorded on an optical memory stripe, similar to compact disks.
Personalization…Printing, encoding
and programming a card with data specific to an individual cardholder.
Prepaid Card…A
card paid for at point of sale permitting the holder to buy goods
and services up to the prepaid value.
Proximity Card…A contactless
card whose presence and data can be sensed by an interface device
not in physical contact with the card.
PVC…Polyvinyl chloride, the most
widely used plastic material for ID cards.
Radio Frequency Card (RFID)…A
proximity card in which the coupling between the card and the
interface device is by radio.
Screen Printing…Method in which
ink is forced through a design-bearing screen made of silk or
other material onto the substrate being printed.
Signature Panel…The area of an
ID card where the cardholder enters a signature.
SIM…Subscriber Identification
Module: the smart card necessary for the operation of GSM phones.
Skimming…Copying the magnetic
stripe encoding from one card to another.
Smart Card…(aka Chip Card, IC Card)… A plastic credit card sized card that contains one or more semiconductor
chips. In the capability category, there are three types: