NXP Semiconductors N.V., which provides high performance mixed signal and standard product solutions that leverage its leading RF, Analog, Power Management, Interface, Security and Digital Processing expertise, has entered into a strategic collaboration with Google to provide a complete open source software stack for Near Field Communications(NFC).

Officials with NXP Semiconductors said that the NFC stack will be fully integrated and validated on Gingerbread, the latest version of the Android (News - Alert) platform.

Company officials said that Google also integrated NXP’s NFC controller (PN544) into its newly launched Nexus STM phone, co-developed by Google and Samsung (News - Alert), offering users access to compelling NFC based services and applications. These game-changing moves immediately bring the richness of NFC to the consumer and developer and device manufacturing communities around the world.With over 100,000 applications and an extensive community of developers Android is a growing player in the smartphone and mobile device world.

According to company officials, with developers now able to access an open source NFC implementation, NXP will help drive the development of new, exciting and creative applications that extend the touch interface of mobile applications beyond the devices screen.

It also enables manufacturers to develop NFC enabled mobile devices with a faster time to market and lower implementation and development costs. “Android's openness has provided a great platform for accelerated innovations,” said Eric Chu (News - Alert), mobile platforms program manager at Google, in a statement.

Chu said that the company is always looking for creative ways to enhance and extend the utilities of mobile devices with new technologies.

He said that with NXP's contribution, the introduction of NFC in Android provides developers, service providers, and device manufacturers a game-changing opportunity to deliver new services while enabling users to interact with each other and the physical world in ways previously not possible. “Although only two years old, industry analysts are already suggesting that Android will be the number two mobile platform by 2014. Google’s adoption of the technology will be a catalyst for the industry to drive the further adoption of NFC at both the handset and application levels,” said Ruediger Stroh, executive vice president and general manager of identification business with NXP Semiconductors (News - Alert).

Stroh said that open source development environments will push the boundaries of innovation and drive revolutionary new services and applications for mobile devices. NFC is a market proven technology co-invented by NXP in 2002. In 2004 NXP co-founded the NFC Forum (News - Alert) to lead the collaboration with all industry stakeholders and help standardize the technology. NFC technology evolved from a combination of contactless identification (RFID) and interconnection technologies.