Fingerprinting Wind Causes Sensors to Move

Fingerprint identification is regarded as the most secure and promising authentication method for mobile payment because of its uniqueness and stability. Apple and other technology giants have already placed a heavy gold layout. In September, the company will launch a mobile phone with fingerprint identification technology. The impact of the integration of smart phones and fingerprint sensors on the industry will accelerate the expansion of fingerprint identification applications and fingerprint sensors will start to sway. The storm is surging or equivalent to the touch screen in 2007, and the range of fingerprint identification applications will be accelerated.

According to market analysts, the recent popularity of fingerprinting has been related to two messages.

First, Apple will launch a mobile phone with fingerprint identification technology next month;

Second, the national identity card fingerprint registration information will be fully rolled out at the end of the year.

Corresponding phenomenon is: A shares of the concept of fingerprint recognition continue to heat up speculation. National agricultural science and technology, the new Cape and other leading two-day gains are nearly 15%, August 15 even appeared in the collective limit of the concept of stocks. With the improvement of fingerprint identification technology, the fingerprint technology industry in the next five years will have nearly ten billion yuan in the market waiting for the company to open up. Fingerprint identification technology is about to usher in a golden period of development, and the market prospect is broad.

The potential demand for safety is huge

Fingerprint recognition is often used in places where personnel identification is required, such as access control systems, time and attendance systems, laptop computers, bank internal processing, bank payments, etc. The potential market is huge.

With the advancement of science and technology, fingerprint identification technology has begun to slowly enter the business field where safety requirements are relatively high. At present, many companies and research institutes have made great breakthroughs in fingerprint recognition technology. Apple or released a new-generation iPhone product on September 10. The new product is likely to have a fingerprint reader; Samsung is trying to introduce a fingerprint recognition password protection mechanism for the Galaxy S series devices to further improve the safety of consumers in products, especially in the commercial field. performance.

Some enterprises that already have fingerprint identification equipment manufacturing technology, such as Beijing Junzheng, are evaluating the possibility of fingerprint identification chips entering the second generation ID field; other enterprises that manufacture fingerprint identification systems, such as Da Shizhi Smart, have already been awarded the company’s C3 system. A number of fingerprint and facial recognition equipment vendors use.

Giant active layout fingerprint sensor

Fingerprint recognition technology is a kind of biometric technology. Fingerprint identification system is a set of pattern recognition systems including fingerprint image acquisition processing and feature extraction comparison. Fingerprint sensor is one of the key devices.

The fingerprint sensor has a complex manufacturing process, and has many sensing units per unit area, including high-end IC design technology, large-scale integrated circuit manufacturing technology, and IC chip packaging technology. More than 10,000 semiconductors are integrated on a wafer surface less than 0.5 square centimeters. Sense unit. It also includes automatic gain circuits and logic control chips, as well as serial, parallel, USB, and other interface circuits. Therefore, almost all fingerprint sensors are developed and manufactured by countries or regions where IC technology is developed, such as the United States, Europe, and Taiwan. Some giants that have not yet stepped in the product are actively deploying and rushing into the field of fingerprint sensors.

Apple purchased AuthenTec, the world’s largest fingerprint sensor supplier, for US$8 per share in July 2012 at a total price of US$356 million. Apple should hope to provide more secure iPhones and iPads by leveraging AuthenTec’s technology. Protection. AuthenTec is a new company established by the fingerprint sensor division that Harris company peeled off in 1998.

In 2004, ST peeled off the fingerprint sensor business and became an independent company called Upek. Now it is AuthenTec's second largest fingerprint sensor supplier in the world.

Fujitsu also announced that it will enter the silicon fingerprint sensor market. Fujitsu obtained licenses for fingerprint sensor technology and fingerprint identification software from Veridicom, and established a dedicated fingerprint sensor development center at Fujitsu Microelectronics in May. The silicon fingerprint sensor will be supplied to the IC card and mobile phone market from this October, and Fujitsu will supply the authentication products required for broadband Internet applications. For example, the company will integrate a fingerprint sensor with an LSI chip for a multifunction IC card using the company's FRAM nonvolatile memory device.

Atmel has been a leader in touch technology and has introduced a range of microcontroller solutions that integrate touch and sensor hub functionality. Atmel has partnered with leading sensor manufacturers to provide designers with the flexibility to choose from the broadest range of sensors from the industry's leading sensor manufacturers, including AKM, Aichi Steel, Bosch, and InvenSense. Intersil and Kionix. These partnerships enable Atmel to support pre-certified sensor solutions, thereby shortening the time to market for customer products.

TI has spared no effort in fingerprint development kits such as the low-power TMS320C5515 DSP solution developed for fingerprints.

Atrua was announced in July 2009 by AuthenTec with approximately $4.9 million in cash.

FingerPrint Card is a Swedish listed company. The company has a patented reflective detection technology (and other companies are generally direct detection technology), so that the thickness of the surface protective layer of the fingerprint sensor can reach about 100 times that of ordinary capacitive fingerprint sensors. The semiconductor fingerprint sensor produced is recognized and adopted by many manufacturers.

Validity Sensors, a Samsung fingerprint chip supplier, can already mass-produce enough fingerprint sensors to meet the needs of millions of smart phones, and it is also AuthenTec’s biggest competitor.

Three fingerprint sensor performance comparison

There are currently three major types of fingerprint sensors, optical, capacitive, and ultrasonic.

The optical fingerprinting technology uses an optical sensor, but because light cannot penetrate the skin surface for scanning, safety and stability are not very high.

The fingerprint sensor system using a capacitive sensor uses silicon material on its surface and is easily damaged, resulting in a reduced service life, and the recognition rate needs to be improved.

Ultrasonic sensor technology is to emit a trace of ultrasonic signal through the sensor itself, penetrate the skin layer of the finger to control the measurement of the inner layer, to obtain the best fingerprint image. But the cost is higher.