MediaTek has announced the availability of the MT6605, a dual-SIM smartphone solution integrated with micro SD card and NFC technology support.

The MT6605 NFC chip is currently being designed into smartphones built on MediaTek's Android mobile platform, said the company, adding that the first smartphone models based on this new chipset are expected to ship commercially in the second quarter of 2013.

Featuring a unique 3-SWP (single-wire protocol) architecture, the MT6605 allows the co-existence of multiple applications, such as information exchange/retrieval, ticketing, access control/authentication, location-based services and device pairing, all on a single mobile device, MediaTek said.

The MT6605 software stack complies with the NFC Forum Controller Interface (NCI) and works on multiple OS platforms including Android. The chip also incorporates MediaTek's "Beam Plus" technology that optimizes the NFC and Wi-Fi handover procedure and can reduce device paring time significantly at very low power operations, MediaTek added.