Quite at the beginning of my professional carrier in 2005, at Philips Semiconductors, I got the task to automatize contactless testing of Proximity cards. As it turned out, available lab instruments would not give it the intended performance, so in my team, we did a development based on FPGA and fast ADCs to generate the test signals for 13.56 MHz communication, carrier, modulation and commands according protocol. Due to quartz synchronization we could operate the frac-n PLL in a simple way and achieve quite a nice spectrum with low noise in the reception bands for sub-carriers. Software for the test benches included the GUI for configuration of test cases, generation of a detailed log file, and later the automated generation of test reports based on these logs. Serving in ISO/IEC Standardization was a complementary activity to the characterization of several contactless transponder IC platforms in development, in these years.
Although customers had asked for such test stations, this was always denied, until the design-in of NFC interfaces in mobile phones happened 2012. Then, successors of these benches even made it to Cupertino.
