Infineon and IDEX Biometrics offer new platform for biometric smart cards

A research report by ABI Research projects the market for biometric payment cards to reach 353 million pieces per year by 2025, globally, as an optimistic scenario.

Allowing card manufacturers to address this new growing market segment, Infineon Technologies, a global provider of smart-card payment solutions, and IDEX Biometrics ASA, a provider of advanced fingerprint identification and authentication solutions, announced a reference design for the next generation biometric smart-card architecture.

The reference design leverages the combination of Infineon’s new SLC38BML800 security controller with additional GPIO-interfaces and the latest generation of the TrustedBio solution from IDEX Biometrics. This enables fingerprint authentication with low latency, high accuracy, and power efficiency.

“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,” said Tolgahan Yildiz, head of the Payment and Ticketing Solutions product line at Infineon.

The integration of the fingerprint sensor, the secure element, power management, and communications reduce the complexity of card manufacturing and shortens time to market and lowers costs.

“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 ease-of-use, easy integration, high accuracy, and cost-effective biometric smart cards,” Yildiz added.

TrustedBio delivers fingerprint images with highly accurate authentication results (FRR/FAR and PAD performance) for payment applications. With the performance of the SLC38BML800, biometrically authenticated transactions are accomplished in a market-leading speed of less than 500 milliseconds.

An internal clock frequency of up to 100 MHz not only enables biometric fingerprint card applications, the SLC38BML800 is well adaptable for payment, ID, and logical and physical access. Customers using this reference design can easily address these and other authenticated applications with rapid time to market.

“Strong demand drivers for card-based fingerprint authentication are in place for both issuers and users of payment cards,” said Vince Graziani, CEO 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, matching capabilities, as well as power-management functions.”