Smart Card Chip Reads Fingerprints

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February 17, 1998 (4:24 PM EST)

By Andrew Craig,

German technology giant Siemens revealed Tuesday a smart card chip that doubles as a fingerprint reader to verify the user's identity.

The surface of the Fingertip Sensor chip, demonstrated at the SmartCard '98 show, is covered with touch-sensitive sensors that read fingerprints and digitize the image on the chip.

The chip relays the digital image to a database where the identity of the card's user can be checked against a registered fingerprint. Smart cards enabled with the technology can be used for electronic cash transactions, ATM transactions, and other operations for which cardholder identification is critical.

The Fingertip Sensor chip is too large for mass production, Siemens said, but should be widely available by the end of next year.

The chip, still in prototype form, is approximately 100 millimeters square and could break easily. Siemens would like to reduce it to 25 mm.

The Fingertip Sensor makes each card unique, so nobody but the authorized owner can use the card, said Graham Nott, chip card manager at Siemens' United Kingdom division.

"It will make smart cards the safest security method available, and will lead to greater acceptance of them among users, thus opening up new fields of application," Nott said.

Personal indentification numbers, currently the most widely used method to identify cardholders, are expected to be supplemented and perhaps replaced by biometric identification techniques such as fingerprint recognition. Biometrics is the use of unique human characteristics, such as eye pattern or fingerprint, to securely identify an individual to a computer.

"Biometrics won't be fully mature for at least another five years, but it is a very big growth area and will eventually gain mainstream acceptance," said Greg Tapper, an analyst at Giga Information Group.