A 15/spl times/15 mm/sup 2/ single-chip fingerprint sensor and identifier using pixel-parallel processing

User authentication using fingerprints is strongly needed to prevent IC cards and mobile equipment from being used illegally. Some semiconductor sensor chips for fingerprint identification have been presented. However, they require a high-performance microprocessor and large memories, which makes it difficult to embed these chips in small, thin devices. Moreover, it is easy to tamper with the personal data in the microprocessor, memory and sensor chips because they are separate. Incorporating a sensor and identifier in a single chip solves these problems. The LSI architecture integrates the sensor and identifier in a single chip, and provides a sensor-unified fingerprint identifying LSI.

[1]  Roberto Guerrieri,et al.  A fingerprint sensor based on the feedback capacitive sensing scheme , 1998, IEEE J. Solid State Circuits.

[2]  A. Dickinson,et al.  A robust, 1.8 V 250 /spl mu/W direct-contact 500 dpi fingerprint sensor , 1998, 1998 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference. Digest of Technical Papers, ISSCC. First Edition (Cat. No.98CH36156).

[3]  D. McCulloch,et al.  Novel fingerprint scanning arrays using polysilicon TFT's on glass and polymer substrates , 1997, IEEE Electron Device Letters.

[4]  Tetsuji Kobayashi.  A fingerprint image recognition method for network user identification , 1992, Proceedings ICCI `92: Fourth International Conference on Computing and Information.