Developer Resources

ISO 7816 Smart Card Standard

The standardization of smart card systems is an ongoing process. One of the standards most referred to is the ISO7816 standard for integrated chip cards.

ISO stands for International Standards Organization and the standard has been established to describe “Identification Cards – Integrated Circuit Cards with Contacts”. ISO 7816 includes multiple parts the first 5 of which are listed in the following table.

ISO7816 document Description
ISO 7816 part 1 Physical characteristics
ISO 7816 part 2 Dimensions and location of the contacts
ISO 7816 part 3 Electronic signals and transmission protocols
ISO 7816 part 4 Industry commands for interchange
ISO 7816 part 5 Number system and registration procedure for application identifiers
ISO 7816 part 6 Interindustry data elements

The various parts we present here start with an overview without going too much into details. If available, we add free ISO7816 documents. They might be derived from drafts or preliminary documents rather than final version.

If you want to go deeper into ISO 7816, you can get the complete standard directly from the International Standards Organization in Switzerland and purchase the ISO 7816 documents online.

As per all subsequence pages iso-7816-smart-card-standard