The NFC Forum’s board has elected co-vice chairmen, representing rival NFC chip makers Broadcom and NXP Semiconductors, as the standards and trade group continues work trying to expand the reach of NFC technology.

Trevor Pavey of Broadcom and Alexander Rensink of NXP will both serve in the post. They replace outgoing vice chairman Mohamed Awad of Broadcom, whom as NFC Times had earlier reported has moved on to a non-NFC-related role at the U.S.-based chip maker.

Pavey hails originally from Texas Instruments, where he worked more than 25 years, until 2009, serving the last four years as TI’s manager for contactless payments. After that, he worked nearly three years as vice president of product management at DeviceFidelity, before joining Broadcom in 2012, where he is a product-line manager.

Rensink is a strategic marketing director in NXP’s Identification unit, a role in which he works closely with infrastructure suppliers and application developers in the NFC ecosystem. He has worked for NXP since 2007 and has served on the NFC Forum’s board of directors since 2012. He previously worked at Philips Digital Networks and then Philips Semiconductors in various marketing, business development and strategy roles.

Awad had held the vice chairman position for three years. Formerly director of product marketing for NFC at Broadcom, Awad left that role in September. Prasan Pai, senior director for product marketing in Broadcom’s wireless combo connectivity group, told NFC Times he’d be taking on the role among his other duties.

Only Sponsor members of the NFC Forum, a standards and trade group, serve on the board.

Rivals Share Vice Chairman Post
The co-vice chairman post gives the industry’s two largest suppliers of NFC controller chips, NXP and Broadcom, an equal position on the board. NXP, a co-founder of the forum with Sony and Nokia in 2004, had held the chairman’s post until 2008, when Sony’s Koichi Tagawa took over the role. Tagawa had served as vice chairman prior to that.

The forum’s bylaws allow for more than one vice chairperson, forum executive director Paula Hunter told NFC Times through a spokeswoman. And the association has had two people in the role in the past.

“There was no deliberate effort to recruit two vice chairmen in this case; it simply happened that two candidates came forward,” she said, noting that it gives the forum an additional perspective at its officers’ meetings, and it’s “advantageous for us to have two, because they can share the workload.”

The selection of representatives from Broadcom and NXP coincides with the heating up of competition between the two companies for design wins in the coming year, including Samsung’s next high-end phones. Such other chip makers as Qualcomm and MediaTek are entering the NFC controller chip business, as well, and the semiconductor business of Samsung Electronics also has an offer.

Qualcomm and Samsung also have seats on the board, and there are a total of 13 companies represented. Each of the 13 companies pays dues of $50,000 per year. All told, the forum has around 200 members at various membership levels.

Expanding Reach of NFC
Among the top priorities for board and forum are helping its members to promote rollouts of the technology, and that is the goal of the five special interest groups, which the forum created early this year. The markets are payments, retail, transport, health care and consumer electronics.

The forum also continues to work on its device certification program and other interoperability standards. It recently announced memo of understanding to forge a closer working relationship with the Bluetooth Special Interest Group. The effort includes expanding a developers' guide to use NFC in association with Bluetooth low energy, or BLE. Some industry observers view BLE as a threat to NFC, while many others see the two technologies as complementary.

When asked by NFC Times whether the NFC Forum would be developing a new specification for encourage interoperability of NFC chips supporting host-card emulation, or HCE, Hunter said the forum’s NFC controller interface specification, or NCI, already works in combination with outside standards to enable host-card emulation, or HCE. NCI standardizes the connection between the NFC chip and the application processor.

Interest in HCE has soared since Google adopted it for its latest version of Android. It enables the NFC controller to direct communication from contactless terminals to the application processor, not only to secure elements in the phone. BlackBerry has supported HCE in NFC devices since 2011. 

See NFC Times’ Special Report on HCE, Part One and Part Two.

“As the NFC market develops, solutions providers will be taking into account a variety of factors, including security and latency, as they determine the best place to store credentials for their solutions,” Hunter said in a statement. “The NFC Forum is monitoring these developments and will continue its policy of being responsive to marketplace needs in its specification development work.”

Hardware Makers Too Dominant?
The current NFC Forum board includes representatives of seven chip manufacturers– Broadcom, Intel, NEC, NXP, Qualcomm, Renesas, and STMicroelectronics. It also includes three device makers–Nokia, Samsung, and Sony, with the latter two also producing or designing chips. Payment networks Visa and MasterCard Worldwide and search giant Google round out the board.

Awad, during an interview in October with NFC Times, when asked about the view by some industry observers that the forum is too heavily weighted toward hardware companies, noted that the situation relates to the roots of the organization.

“I think it's a fair criticism,” Awad told NFC Times during an interview in October. “It was certainly founded mainly by hardware manufacturers, and the original specifications were really targeted by hardware manufacturers to establish the platform upon which the technology would grow and the platform upon which the vertical applications would grow,” he said.

Hunter, shortly after her appointment in September as executive director, told NFC Times that the perception is not a major concern. But, in any case, she said the launch of the special interest groups targeting the five vertical markets would make the forum more inclusive.

“I think that we’ve done in the last year rolling out the SIGs is really to start focus on the market adoption, and in order to succeed in any of those market segments that the SIGs are focusing on, we have to take a holistic approach, so it’s not going to be just about hardware,” she said.

Dan Balaban contributed to this report.