The standardization of smart card systems is an ongoing process. One of the standards most referred to is the ISO-7816 standard. ISO stands for International Standards Organization and the standard has been established to describe "Identification Cards - Integrated Circuit Cards with Contacts". It includes multiple parts the first 5 of which are listed in the following table.

The various parts we present here start with an overview without going too much into details. If available, we add free ISO7816 documents. If you want to go deeper into ISO 7816, you can get the complete standard directly from the International Standards Organization in Switzerland and purchase the ISO 7816 documents over the web.