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UK-based NFC chip technology and tag company Innovision today announced another contract for its NFC chip designs with what the company described as a major semiconductor supplier.

The deal will generate about $2 million in revenue this fiscal year, mainly in licensing fees, and more than $6 million over several years, including revenue from royalties, projected the company.

The deal follows a licensing and development contract the company announced in April with another unidentified global semiconductor supplier. Innovision has earlier said it has similar deals with five of the top 10 to 20 makers of wireless chips for phones. The chips combine two or more wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth, GPS, FM radio and WiFi. With Innovision intellectual property, the chip makers could include NFC functionality, as well, said the company. The chips are mainly destined for smartphones.

The latest contract is significant because it is the first in which a semiconductor maker licensing the Innovision IP will customize the technology itself, with its own engineers, not those of Innovision, said CEO David Wollen in a statement. He said the chip maker is targeting high volumes of mobile phones and other consumer devices with the chips incorporating NFC.

The new deal involves the second version of Innovision’s Gem NFC chip IP, which operates at a lower voltage, in addition to other enhancements. While available for the past several months or more for large semiconductor suppliers, Stephen Graham, Innovision’s vice president of marketing, said the company is also packaging the new version with second- and third-tier chip makers in mind. They don’t have large engineering staffs to customize the designs themselves.

“That is absolutely the intention, to enable a much a broader range of semiconductor companies (to produce NFC chips),” he told NFC Times. 

While chip makers could use the Innovision IP for standalone NFC chips like those produced or planned by NXP Semiconductors, Inside Contactless and STMicroelectronics, Innovision is focusing mainly on combo wireless chips, made by such companies as Texas Instruments, Broadcom and Qualcomm.

Chips packing Innovision IP, however, probably won’t hit the market until 2012. 

Innovision also makes RFID tags that its NFC chips in phones or other devices can read. The company reported revenue for the first half of 2009 of £1.04 million (US$1.6 million) and a net loss of £1.6 million.