It has had an erratic hype cycle: two years ago it was all the rage, ditto a few years before that. Does it now have a permanent, assured place? Mohamed Awad, Associate product line director at Broadcom's wireless group thinks it has. NFC, he claims, will ultimately enable mobile wallet but in the mean time Broadcom will focus on integrating NFC with other radio technologies and using it to "simplify connectivity", often by bootstrapping WiFi or bluetooth for a speedy device-to-device file exchange