Not much information has been escaping Inside Secure’s headquarters in Aix-en-Provence, France, the past few weeks.

The plucky no. 2 NFC chip supplier had always been eager to promote itself. But there’s been none of that of late, except for a couple of official press releases: No projections, no internal figures passed around to employees. No forward-looking statements.

If there is an information clampdown, it is apparently Inside’s effort to get its message straight as it prepares to present itself to investors in a public offering.

The time couldn’t be better for Inside to go public. The buzz on NFC technology continues to build. And Inside has a contract with one of the world’s largest smartphone makers, Research in Motion, to supply NFC chips for RIM’s planned rollout of BlackBerrys supporting the technology. RIM has ordered up to 20 million or 25 million NFC chips from Inside, though the full order isn’t finalized.

NFC phone shipments could approach 100 million units this year if Google’s rosy projections for Android NFC smartphone shipments come to pass, NXP Semiconductors CEO Richard Clemmer said during a conference call following release of the chip maker’s first quarter results.

The shipment total would include phones supporting all types of operating systems and using chips from all suppliers, not just Google’s Android platform or NFC chips from NXP.

The forecast is higher than NXP’s projection of 70 million NFC phones shipped from all suppliers that NXP made earlier this year. But Clemmer also warned yesterday that it’s too early to tell how many NFC phones will be on the market this year, since introductions are expected to “ramp in the back half of the year.”