Texas Instruments Inc. is expected today to announce a thin contactless payment chip that can be used to produce stronger plastic payment cards.
The Dallas company said the chip is 26% thinner than those used in most contactless cards. When the chip is embedded in the cards, the cards can be made more durable by using thicker plastic.
Steve Turner, Texas Instruments' marketing manager for contactless payment, said cards with the thinner chip can survive more passes through a printing press without breaking, which lets issuers create cards with more complex designs and vivid colors.
The new chip was developed, in part, for an issuer that "wanted to go contactless … [but] could not get the card to look how they wanted it to look," he said in an interview last week.
That bank, which Mr. Turner would not name, needed a card that could be run through a printing 30 times, but contactless cards with thicker chips were not durable enough for such a production process.
