An increasing number of companies have moved from standard plastic badges to more sophisticated and secure smart cards. They want to combine card printing and electronic personalization (a/k/k encoding, programming) of their cards. This can be done via contact (ISO7816) or via contactless (ISO 15693 & ISO 14443) interfaces such as Mifare, DESFire, Hitag, HID iCLASS, i-code, Legic and many  more).

To program integrated circuit cards (ICC) a printer must be equipped with a smart card encoder or chip programmer. This can be a contact station or docking station with contactless 13.56 MHz (ISO 14443, ISO 15693) smart chip encoder. This is a device very similar to a smart card reader/writer that is adapted to work as an encoder for memory cards and CPU cards. Smart chip card encoders are also referred to as card readers,  couplers or programmers.

CardWerk provides vendor independent encoder integration services. We make chip encoder recommendations if your printer’s built in encoder does not meet your chip card specifications. If need be we upgrade your existing printer with a well-tested encoder. Typically we test a smart card printer with integrated chip encoder before handing it over to our customers.

Our smart card printer/encoder integration/consulting package contains everything you need for state-of-the-art:

• chip card issuance 
• smart card personalization
• smart card application loading
• smart chip card customization

The resulting system can then combine card printing and chip encoding.

One of our specialties is the integration and customization of commercial card imaging software. This enables our customers to offer a coordinated personalization process that embraces database driven chip card encoding and smart card printing.

Last not least, if smart chip card programming can’t be done with commercially available imaging software, CardWerk will be happy to develop card issuance software from scratch for you.