The NXP P60 board was an Ambimat engineering project: a development board carrying a secure element in SIM form factor, built while Ambimat was a vendor to NXP for its payment development kits. This page is a record of that project.
What the project was
Ambimat built its first development kit for an NXP secure element in 2016, working as a vendor to NXP on several of its payment development kits. On this board the secure element is fitted into a SIM-card socket rather than soldered down, which is what makes it a development vehicle: the element can be changed without reworking the board.
What was implemented on the board
- The secure element communicates with the host MCU over a Smart UART interface.
- The MCU can read the ATR from the secure element.
- The same secure element can be reached contactlessly through the NFC antenna.
- The board has been interfaced with the KW41Z and with the Hexiwear platform, both from NXP.
About the NXP P60 platform
For readers arriving on the term itself: P60 is NXP’s own designation for its SmartMX2 family of secure smart-card controllers, used as the secure element in payment cards and in NFC-enabled devices. Those are NXP’s products and NXP’s specifications, described on the SmartMX2 P60 product page. Nothing in that family specification should be read as a specification of the Ambimat board described above — the board is a development carrier, and only the interfaces listed in the previous section are attested here.
What this project shows today
Bringing a secure element up on a host MCU is a specific skill: the wired interface has to be timed correctly, the ATR has to be read and interpreted, and the same element usually has to answer over the contactless path as well. This project is evidence that Ambimat has done that work to a semiconductor vendor’s own requirements. The wider NFC, UHF and RFID practice, including the AmbiTap NFC reader module, is described on NFC/UHF/RFID, and the secure-element and payment reference material is collected under APDU responses.
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