High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Near field communication, or NFC, allows for simplified transactions, data exchange, and wireless connections between two devices in proximity to each other, usually by no more than a few centimeters. It is expected to become a widely used system for making payments by smartphone in the United States. Many smartphones currently on the market already contain embedded NFC chips that can send encrypted data a short distance ("near field") to a reader located, for instance, next to a retail cash register. Shoppers who have their credit card information stored in their NFC smartphones can pay for purchases by waving their smartphones near or tapping them on the reader, rather than using the actual credit card. Co-invented by NXP Semiconductors and Sony in 2002, NFC technology is being added to a growing number of mobile handsets to enable mobile payments, as well as many other applications.