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Smart Card

Computer Engineering

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A smart card is a plastic card embedded with an integrated circuit chip that can store and process data, used for identification, payment, telecommunications and access control. The French inventor Roland Moreno patented the underlying memory-card concept in 1974, and French banks and the state telephone operator commercialized the technology through the late 1970s and 1980s, first for prepaid telephone cards and later for bank cards. A smart card is read by inserting or tapping it against a compatible reader, which powers the embedded chip and exchanges data with it.

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