The NFC Forum has announced the availability of one adopted and four candidate technical specifications, following approval by the Board of Directors. The specifications are available on the NFC Forum website, according to a press release from the group.

Formerly a candidate specification, the Analog 2.0 Technical Specification delivers new capabilities that support improved RF communication to ensure interoperability between Near Field Communication (NFC) devices and existing RF infrastructure and cards based on the ISO/IEC 14443 and ISO/IEC 18092 standards.

The NFC Forum Type 1-4 Tag Candidate Specifications, currently open for industry comment, allow for enhanced communications between an NFC-enabled device and different existing tag hardware.

"With almost 40 billion connected devices expected by 2020 and over one billion NFC-enabled devices already in the market, the importance of NFC RF communication interoperability and NFC tags will continue to grow, especially in the transportation, Internet of Things and payments markets," said Koichi Tagawa, chairman of the NFC Forum. "These NFC Forum technical specifications provide engineers the freedom to create advanced, innovative designs that offer a consistent user experience without having to risk interoperability issues with the existing infrastructure."