NXP Ultralight EV1 (48 Byte)

The NXP MIFARE Ultralight® EV1 is a updated version of the very popular Ultralight chip from NXP. The original Ultralight chip dates back to 2001 and the product has been used for ticketing the world over. It’s a very simple, reliable and cost effective product. Unfortunately, there’s probably almost as many non-genuine MIFARE Ultralight chips as genuine ones. The EV1 update added an originality check feature to help counteract this.

There are two variants of the Ultralight EV1 with two memory capacities. The smaller chip has 48 bytes of usable memory (similar to the NTAG210 and NTAG210micro) and the larger has 128 bytes (similar to the NTAG212).

MIFARE vs. NTAG

NXP have divided their products into groups, partly for marketing reasons and partly for technical reasons. Two of these chip families are NTAG and MIFARE. The MIFARE series is primarily aimed at transport ticketing, event ticketing and vouchers. The NTAG series tends to focus more on mobile use cases such as marketing, asset tagging, product identification and product authentication.

While the MIFARE Ultralight predates not only NFC in mobile phones but the smart phone itself, it’s compatible with all current mobile phones. This is partly because chips such as the Ultralight defined the specifications in the first place.

It’s a good, reliable and cost effective NFC chip for a number of mobile phone use cases. However, be very careful that you are buying the newer EV1 and even then, be careful where you buy. There are a lot of non-genuine, low performance tags on the market.

Seritag would recommend that for mobile use, the NTAG210 micro or NTAG213 chips are better choices.

Key Features

Key Specifications

Phone compatibility

Typical Use Cases

User Features

Technical Specifications

Compare the Ultralight EV1 (48 Byte) to other chips