Idex Biometrics and Infineon integrate security controller and BSoC to simplify biometric card production

Idex Biometrics and Infineon have partnered to develop a reference design for the architecture of next-generation biometric smart cards.

The reference design combines the latest version of Idex’ TrustedBio biometric-system-on-chip (BSoC) and Infineon’s new SLC38BML800 security controller and additional GPIO interfaces. The combination delivers low-latency fingerprint authentication with high accuracy and power efficiency, according to the announcement, while the integration of the biometric sensor, secure element, power management and communications components reduces manufacturing complexity to lower costs and reduce time to market.

The partners are targeting the biometric payment card market forecast to reach 353 million units a year by 2025 by ABI Research in a late-2020 report.

“This new design provides significant improvements at the card system level, which allow easy integration into existing hot lamination card manufacturing processes. Therefore, the architecture increases card performance, while reducing manufacturing complexity at the same time,” states Tolgahan Yildiz, head of the Payment and Ticketing Solutions product line at Infineon. “The additional interfaces and the energy efficiency of our security controller allow industrialization of high performance biometric smart cards. This fingerprint solution is yet another proof point for our continuous innovation to enable easy to use, easy to integrate, highly accurate and cost effective biometric smart cards.”

TrustedBio provides fingerprint images capable of highly accurate authentication results for payment applications in terms of false rejections, false acceptance, and presentation attack detection performance, Idex says, and the SLC38BML800 returns transaction results within 500 milliseconds which the companies say is market-leading speed. The SLC38BML800 is also adaptable for ID and logical and physical access control applications, Infineon says.

“Strong demand drivers for card-based fingerprint authentication are in place for both issuers and users of payment cards,” comments Vince Graziani, Chief Executive Officer of IDEX Biometrics. “However, to date, the relatively high cost of manufacturing biometrically enabled smart cards has inhibited mass-market adoption. With TrustedBio, IDEX Biometrics has integrated a patented, highly differentiated polymer sensor into a single device delivering proprietary image capture, processing, and matching capabilities, as well as power management functions. No other biometric solution on the market offers this level of integration.”

Graziani somewhat cryptically referred to pending announcements and positive developments for Idex Biometrics during the second half of calendar-2021 in a blog post.

Article Topics

biometric cards  |  biometrics  |  fingerprint sensors  |  Idex Biometrics  |  Infineon  |  payments  |  presentation attack detection  |  research and development  |  secure element  |  stocks