Biometric smart cards with scalable manufacturability

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

“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 additional interfaces and the energy efficiency of our security controller allow industrialisation 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.”

“Strong demand drivers for card-based fingerprint authentication are in place for both issuers and users of payment cards,” added 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.”

TrustedBio delivers fingerprint images with high 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 100MHz not only enables biometric fingerprint card applications, the SLC38BML800 is very 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.

Samples of Infineon’s SLC38BML800 security controller can be ordered now, mass production is planned to start at the end of 2021. A software development kit for the reference design is available from IDEX. Samples of IDEX Biometrics’ TrustedBio solution are available, with mass production starting by the end of the third quarter of 2021.