BCM2079x

Near Field Communication (NFC) is quickly shaping up to be a must-have feature in this next generation of smartphones. We talked about it briefly in the context of the Nexus S, where it promised to enable contactless payments, tag reading, easier pairing, and simple peer-to-peer transfer. Though there is only one practicable NFC contactless payment implementation to date in the Nexus S 4G on Sprint, more are coming as carriers and payment processors work out the details. To date, the implementations we've seen in the Nexus S have used NXP's PN544, and there are other NFC controllers on the market from Inside Secure and STMicroelectronics. Today, Broadcom is joining that fray with their own discrete NFC controller, the BCM2079x family, which it claims will...