Introduction
NFC Controller Interface (NCI) Specification Page 18
1.11 Coding Conventions
The following coding conventions apply in this document if not stated otherwise.
• Each octet is represented by bits b0 to b7, where b7 is the most significant bit (msb) and b0
the least significant bit (lsb). In all representations, the leftmost bit is the msb.
• All values greater than 1 octet are sent and received in Little Endian format.
• In representations of octet arrays, each octet is numbered, starting at 0. Octet numbered 0 is
sent over the NCI Transport first.
This document uses the following notations for numbers:
• Values expressed in hexadecimal form are preceded by ‘0x’.
• Values expressed in binary form are followed by a lower case ‘b’.
In this document, the following rules apply for fields or values defined as Reserved for Future
Use (RFU):
• For an NCI message including fields with a subset of octets or bits defined as RFU, the
sender SHALL set these octets or bits to the value indicated in this document or to zero if no
value is given.
• For an NCI message including fields with a subset of octets or bits defined as RFU, the
receiver SHALL disregard these octets or bits and SHALL keep the same interpretation of
any other field of the whole message, unless explicitly stated otherwise.
For fields that could contain values that are defined as RFU, the sender of an NCI message
SHALL NOT set these fields to the RFU values.
If a parameter is defined as meaningless in certain conditions, the message sender SHALL
include the parameter, but MAY set its value to any value. The message receiver SHALL ignore
the parameter value.
Values defined as Proprietary MAY be used by implementations for extensions that are out of
scope of this specification.
In this document, Control Messages are defined by using tables specifying the message
parameters. Control Messages SHALL be coded in the order and length as specified by the
corresponding definition table (first parameter being defined in the topmost table row).
The names of Parameters that can be present multiple times in a Control Message are followed by
square brackets surrounding the number of times the parameter is to be included. This
information is expressed by an index range (e.g., [1..10]). The upper bound of this range can be a
variable defined by another parameter. The parameter instances SHALL follow each other
sequentially. The corresponding parameter length indicates the length of a single parameter
instance (not the length of the complete parameter set).