October 2005 - ISAMs roll off the production line

October 2005 - Another major milestone in the history of ITSO has been achieved in October with the production of the 30,000th ITSO Security Application Module or ISAM.

The ISAMs will soon be being delivered to major transport initiatives throughout the UK to provide the foundation for one of the most exciting phases of passenger transport development in the UK.

As a key component of the ITSO environment the ISAM is the advanced device that sits in ticket issuing and accepting machines. Its function is to provide, read and frank ITSO tickets on user smartcards electronically as well as securely storing the transactions for subsequent distribution to the originators of the tickets.

The ISAMs are provided by Ecebs and their Managing Director David Braddock commented: “The 30,000th ISAM being produced is a very significant development in the history of ITSO. When you consider how many buses, gates and electronic ticket machines will now be able to be equipped with these ISAMs, the momentum behind the ITSO development is apparent.” He continued: “Moreover, these ISAMs are intended for customers spread geographically throughout the UK so the coverage is not just numerical, but also regional.”

Atmel provides the principle hardware components contained in the ISAM. Ian Duthie, Marketing Manager for Atmel’s Smart Card ICs Division commented “The innovative design proposed by Ecebs to meet the ITSO specification for the ISAM proved to be technically challenging at the start of the project, both from design and production to produce a 4M-Byte SIM Module, requiring close co-operation between Atmel, ECEBS and Sagem, who manufacture the SIM format module.

It is gratifying to see the validation of such a concept by achievement of volume production”. Since starting this project till today, Atmel’s Smart Card Design and Test facility has doubled it headcount resources, while its UK Wafer Fabrication site in North Tyneside has migrated from a ‘Start-up’ site to one of Atmel’s leading state-of-the-art Fabrication site’s, with approximately 90% of its output dedicated to serving the secure smartcard market. “We are well positioned and ready to serve the UK market with SAMs and contactless micro controllers to meet the ITSO requirements”, he added.

Mike Eastham, ITSO General Manager added: “The ISAM is a tremendously powerful piece of technology. Not only does it facilitate, via the ITSO Specification, the interoperability of a wide variety of smartcard ticketing technologies, it has other attributes as well.

The ISAM enables transactions to be conducted extremely quickly and with much higher levels of security. These attributes apply whether the ticket is a small value single transaction or with very large value multiple transaction capability such as a season ticket. The fact that 30,000 ISAMs have now been produced for the UK transport market shows that we are well on our way to providing interoperable smartcard ticketing and all the benefits it will bring to passengers, operators and providers.”