Card Operating Systems

A smart card operating system is a type of embedded operating system. There are many of them for the same reasons that there are many embedded and real-time operating systems. It is not certain that there will ever be a DOS for smart cards although many companies continue to pursue this vision.

Historically smart card operating systems have been bundled with smart card hardware so it was difficult to buy a smart card chip and an operating system independently. It was even harder to license a smart card operating system that you could customize and put on your own chip. This situation is changing slowly.