Leading vendor Broadcom has unveiled a new family of NFC chips in an attempt to narrow the gap with market leader NXP and rivals such as Inside Secure.  The company says the first handsets incorporating its new chipset will appear in handsets launching in mid-2012, according to an interview on Bloomberg with company vice president Craig Ochikubo. He would not name the vendors using the chipset but the company in the past has supplied Apple, HP and Dell.

Broadcom hopes its revamped NFC chips will enable it to challenge the likes of NXP. The effort the company has put into the technology is a vote of confidence at a moment when optimism has dropped a notch or two in the NFC market. NXP downgraded its market estimates for the NFC market in its most recent quarterly numbers. Now it has a fight on its hands from Broadcom which claims its new chips are “90 percent more energy efficient and 40 percent smaller” than rival products.  Broadcom has revitalised its NFC chipsets through the acquisition last year of Innovision Research & Technology. The new chipsets are the result of integrating Innovision’s technology with its own, the company said.