NFC transceiver Android AOSP integration

[Anarchimedes]

Hi, Iam a embedded systems engineer currently working on a NFC payment terminal using Android as it OS.

We have selected the ST25R3916B chip as the NFC transceiver, given its hardware characteristics it would be perfectly suitable for our application.

I know that there is no currently working example of its linux demo driver "STSW-ST25R013" on Android, and would like some directions on how I could implement this integration, Iam already familiar with the Android framework architecture, and have seen that the st21nfca and st95hf chips have been integrated into android in the past, but in both cases they dont use RFAL, and the above mentioned demo driver for the st25r3916b chip does use it. So, is there any nfc chip that has been integrated into Android that is similar enough to st25r3916b for me to use as a base for integration? Any help or information is appreciated, and if ST could directly give me any support I would be glad to share the code with the community once its has been fully validated.  

[Ulysses HERNIOSUS · Accepted solution]

Hello Anarchimedes,

If you talk about Android then typically these systems have some NFC stack which expects an NFC Controller talking NCI. ST21NFCx/ST54 natively support NCI and should integrate nicely.

ST25R39xx/200/95 etc. are more frontends with a more low level interface. They are not performing many of the actions autonomously as an NFC Controller. So the driver would need to run more background activities than for an NFC Controller.

I don't want to say that such is not possible but definitely you will need to do quite some integration work and need to learn many of the NFC and NCI details to do so.

Regards, Ulysses