Electronic travel documents must meet
the challenge of surviving 5, 10 or perhaps more years
of widely varying storage and use conditions. This
might include trips through the laundry, bending and
twisting while stuffed into a traveler’s pocket
and violent impacts from mechanical visa stamps at
border crossings. This set of conditions is unique
to the electronic travel document market and supplants
all notions of traditional reliability of the key
semiconductor component. Producers of the document
must trade off robustness of the components and finished
product with process and cost constraints. A further
challenge for contending producers is to define and
execute a suite of tests which can be relied upon
to demonstrate the desired durability. Both challenges
of testing and proposed solutions for achieving the
required durability will be key topics of discussion
at Electronic Passport Forum.
