Micropross end of life and rebuilding the NFC test environment — migrating to the KEOLABS platform
Micropross products, long used across NFC measurement, have moved through end of life since the acquisition by National Instruments, which constrains new procurement and long-term maintenance. For new NFC evaluation and certification environments we therefore recommend moving to a configuration built around KEOLABS products, with continuity of supply, support, calibration and standards coverage in mind.
Key points
- NI acquired Micropross in 2015, and NI itself became part of Emerson in 2023
- In September 2024, NI announced the transfer of the service request process for Micropross products. The product pages state that they are at end of life, and NI no longer sells or services them
- Maintenance, repair and calibration of existing equipment such as the MP300 range continues officially through FIME, staffed by the former Micropross design engineers. This keeps existing equipment running, but it is not a basis for a new environment
- The replacement question is not which box to buy but how to rebuild the environment for each device under test. The core is ProxiLAB Quest, ProxiSPY Quest and SCRIPTIS™, with the test suites and accessories for the relevant specifications
Background: the Micropross product lifecycle ends
Micropross was for years the de facto instrument range for NFC and smart cards, and the MP300, MP500 and CTS (Contactless Test Station) families were standard equipment in many laboratories. NI acquired Micropross in 2015 and sold the products under its own brand thereafter, but NI itself became part of Emerson in 2023, and in September 2024 an announcement transferred the service request process for Micropross products. The NI product pages now state that these products are at end of life, so basing a new project on Micropross equipment carries significant risk across procurement, maintenance, calibration, repair and software updates.
Rebuilding rather than extending
For existing Micropross equipment, FIME officially provides preventive maintenance, diagnostics, hardware repair, calibration and firmware maintenance across the whole MP300 range — C3, CL3, C3+CL3, MX1, MCL1 and others, including racks and accessories — staffed by the former Micropross design engineers. Existing installations can be kept running. But with future specification revisions, new product development and scheme approval in view, continuing to run a test environment built on end-of-life equipment is itself a risk. The practical approach is to treat the existing environment as a bridge and migrate progressively to the KEOLABS platform.
Replacement map by test area
| NFC and 13.56 MHz development and debugging (previously MP500 and CTS) | ProxiLAB Quest (PICC, PCD and NFC signal emulator, with antenna characterisation by VNA) |
|---|---|
| Contactless communication capture and analysis (previously Micropross analysers) | ProxiSPY Quest (non-intrusive tracing from the analogue layer to the application layer) and NomadLAB for field use |
| NFC Forum testing (previously CTS) | ProxiLAB Quest with NFC Forum accessories (Poller and Listener reference antennas and calibration kit) and the corresponding test suites |
| EMVCo Contactless Level 1 (previously CTS) | ProxiLAB Quest with the SCRIPTIS™ analogue and digital test suites and EMVCo accessories (Test PICC, Test PCD and CMR) |
| ISO/IEC 14443/15693/18092 | ProxiLAB Quest and ProxiSPY Quest with ISO/IEC 10373-6 and -7 suites and fixtures |
| FeliCa/NFC-F | The KEOLABS NFC-F environment (Sony and KEOLABS have worked together on NFC-F test tools) |
| Log analysis and interoperability checking (previously MPManager and similar) | The Quest, SCRIPTIS™ and ProxiSPY analysis environment |
Keeping the layers distinct during migration
Design the migration in three separate layers.1. Analogue and Level 1 testing — field strength, waveforms, load modulation, timing, resonance frequency, Q factor and so on — is built from ProxiLAB Quest, the SCRIPTIS analogue suite and the accessories for each specification.2. Digital and protocol testing — ISO/IEC 14443 Type A and B, ISO/IEC 15693, FeliCa, NFC-IP1 and IP2, and the NFC Forum Digital Protocol — uses ProxiLAB Quest as tester and emulator alongside ProxiSPY Quest for tracing live communication.3. Scheme approval (EMVCo and NFC Forum) does not follow from owning the instruments alone. What matters is the approved test tools recognised by the programme, the test case versions and the calibration status. When KEOLABS equipment is introduced we confirm the current qualified tool configuration against the applicable specification, the product and the scope of approval required.
Two starting points
For existing Micropross users this is a planned replacement of the Micropross environment; for new customers it is simply a current evaluation environment covering NFC Forum, EMVCo and ISO. The core is the same in both cases: ProxiLAB Quest for signal emulation, ProxiSPY Quest for analysis and SCRIPTIS™ as the runtime, with the test suites and accessories for the relevant specifications layered on top. The practical gain from rebuilding is that development debugging, certification testing and interoperability troubleshooting in the field are all handled with one vendor's toolset.