As demand continues to grow for using NFC technology to make pairing of consumer electronics devices more convenient, Netherlands-based NXP Semiconductors has added two new tags, both designed for NFC device pairing, to its NTAG line.

The new tags, NTAG213F AND NTAG216F, are NFC Forum Type 2 compliant and will enable pairing of mobile handsets with devices via a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection. Users can tap the tags with an NFC capable smartphone to make the connection.

The “F” designation means that these tags are equipped with “field detection,” which allows tags embedded in consumer electronic devices to activate the devices when an NFC field is detected. NXP’s first generation device pairing tag, NTAG203F, also uses field detection.

“The market as such has been out there for a while, but we see a very strong interest for such products,” Ralf Kodritsch, NXP’s director of marketing, RFID tagging, told NFC Times.

The NTAG21xF tags also feature a “sleep mode” option, which enables tags attached to a battery-powered device to detect a low battery and prevent the device from pairing with a user’s smartphone.

Like its device-pairing predecessor NTAG203F and its non-pairing counterpart NTAG213, the NTAG213F holds 144 bytes of user memory. NTAG216F, like the current NTAG216, holds 888 bytes for user data.

“We did get market feedback that there was even more memory necessary, hence we introduced the NTAG216F with roughly six times the memory size, from 144 bytes to 888 bytes,” Kodritsch told NFC Times. The 144 byte user memory of the NTAG203F or NTAG213F can store “a basic connection handover,” he said, while the 888 byte user memory of the NTAG216F is enough for “a complex Wi-Fi handover.”

The NTAG216F tags include features like password authentication which are also available on the company’s popular NTAG203, as well as the features introduced in November 2012 in NXP’s second generation NTAG21x line, such as an “originality signature” for product identification and an offline counter to keep track of how many times the tag has been tapped–and in the case of the NTAG21xF tags, how many times a device has been paired with a smartphone.

These features include a “UID ASCII mirror,” which would enable tag producers to more easily embed the UID, or unique identifier serial number, in an NDEF message on each tag. This enables smartphones to read the tag’s unique serial number as part of the NDEF message rather than sending an additional command to do so.

“The idea behind a product family, instead of a single product, is to address the different needs of NFC applications,” Giancarlo Cutrignelli, senior global marketing manager at NXP Cutrignelli told NFC Times in November 2012.

When NXP announced its NTAG21x line last fall, it said that UID mirroring would allow faster encoding of UIDs on chips, which in turn would enable faster production of tags for marketing campaigns for brands. With the NTAG21xF line targeting device pairing, NXP is hoping to accomplish faster rollouts for consumer electronics orders as well.

Last month, the NFC Forum introduced a new candidate standard, Connection Handover 1.3, which, if accepted, will be a successor to the current Connection Handover 1.2 specification. The Connection Handover specification pertains to the use of NFC to set up Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connections between devices. The candidate specification, Version 1.3, adds support for mediated handover, in which an NFC-enabled device acts as a mediator to facilitate connection handover between two other NFC-enabled devices, which may be stationary or too large to tap normally.