Fidelica Microsystems is a start up company with MEMS based technology for fingerprint sensor applications. We recently spoke with Dr. S K Ganapathi, the founder and CEO of the company, about Fidelica's latest progress and market outlook for its fingerprint sensors.
MEMS Investor Journal: Your company raised $10 million in 2002 and had approximately 25 employees at that point. What progress has been made since then and what is the current status?
Dr. Ganapathi: We have migrated our product to a fully flexible, plastics based thin film technology for manufacture of fingerprint sensors. The uniqueness of this approach is that while we will still target mass markets such as cell phones and PCs, we have also opened up an enormous market opportunity to integrate the sensor into credit cards, smart cards and other identity and security cards. The market for these products is just as big, if not bigger, than the cell phone market, and our combination of flexibility and low cost makes this an ideal application. There is no other competitor that we know of that can incorporate a touch based fingerprint sensor into a card and still meet ISO requirements for card manufacturing. Traditional silicon based solutions are too thick, too expensive, and will also break when the card is bent.
MEMS Investor Journal: Have you shipped your product to customers? Is your system currently installed in product applications?
Dr. Ganapathi: Yes, we are currently in several pilot programs with both corporate and government customers for usage of the sensor in a smart card, or "badge" platform, both for physical access, as well as corporate network security applications. These are high value contracts, and are being deployed because of the advantages of the smart card form factor, and its compatibility with existing card reader infrastructure around various government agencies and corporate networks. Some of these applications include airport security, building access, employee tracking, and corporate network security.
To our knowledge, we are the only company that can provide this solution in a reliable and cost effective manner for these applications.
MEMS Investor Journal: Your biometric sensor is based on MEMS pressure sensors. What are some alternative technological approaches and why is the MEMS approach better?
Dr. Ganapathi: Traditional fingerprint sensing technology is based on capacitance measurements. There are two inherent disadvantages to this. First, it requires CMOS for its implementation, which results in a very high cost due to the size of the chip to acquire a fingerprint. Second, the image is in grayscale, which is strongly affected by the condition of the finger (wet, dry, oily, sweaty, etc.), and also requires considerable processing power and memory to process the fingerprint image and store it.
Our MEMS approach is much simpler: it uses pressure differences to distinguish between the ridge and the valley of a finger. The resulting image is therefore much less sensitive to finger conditions, and the image is binary, which requires vastly lower processor requirements. The second major advantage of this approach is that we can completely eliminate the need for CMOS transistors, which allows us to build the sensor on a PLASTIC substrate. Plastic substrates can be processed in a roll to roll fashion, thus dramatically reducing the cost per square centimeter in manufacturing. These substrates are extremely thin (<0.5mm), flexible, and reliable.
The combination of performance, thickness, flexibility and cost, and the added benefit of requiring very simple processors, allows us to integrate the entire authentication solution (image acquisition, processing, template generation and storage) into a credit card, smart card, or identity card, thus allowing full authentication within the card without changing the infrastructure requirements of the card readers.
MEMS Investor Journal: Besides your own product, what are some of the competing products which have been commercialized and are currently implemented in real world applications?
Dr. Ganapathi: The silicon based capacitive fingerprint sensor is gaining considerable traction. Our competitors are already in cell phones and PCs and laptops. The number of fingerprint sensors shipped worldwide has risen dramatically from a few hundred thousand just a few years ago, to between five and ten million units this year.
It is important to point out that our sensor is a full area sensor -- which requires a user to simply place their finger on the sensor, as opposed to the "swipe" sensor of the competition, which requires a user to sweep their finger across the sensor -- and yet, although the sensor is five times larger than the competition, it will be more cost effective as a solution! For cell phone applications, a "touch" sensor has advantages such as being more intuitive, and allows the device to be used in a one-handed operation and also facilitating multiple uses, such as being used as a "touchpad" for navigation, selection and toggling features.
MEMS Investor Journal: Are you currently looking for additional funding and what do you plan to do with the money?
Dr. Ganapathi: Yes, we are currently doing a Series C round of funding. We have interest from some corporate strategic investors, and also existing investors. The money is for working capital to expand our marketing efforts and grow our revenue and customer base, and to ramp up manufacturing. We have blue chip manufacturing partners that we have been working with very closely to integrate the technology into a roll to roll format.
MEMS Investor Journal: At present, how much does your system cost? How will that change in the future?
Dr. Ganapathi: In volume, the fingerprint sensor will be in the low single digits, because of the economies of scale of roll to roll manufacturing. This will put it in the right price range for deployment into cell phones and credit cards or smart cards, especially in high value add applications.
MEMS Investor Journal: Who are some of the other companies who are using MEMS technologies for biometric applications?
Dr. Ganapathi: We are not aware of any other company using MEMS for biometric applications.
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Dr. Ganapathi (K. G.) has a PhD in Materials Science and Engineering from Ohio State University. He started his career as a post-doctoral research fellow at the Center for Magnetic Recording Research at the University of California, San Diego. He then served in various engineering management capacities with Applied Magnetics Corporation and Read-Rite Corporation, before joining the founding team of DAS Devices, Inc., a startup in thin film recording heads. DAS was sold to Applied Magnetics Corporation in February 1999. Following the merger, Dr. Ganapathi served as Vice President and General Manager of the San Jose division of Applied Magnetics, with responsibility for all R&D, engineering, customer qualification, and prototype operations. Dr. Ganapathi founded Fidelica Microsystems in June 1999. Dr. Ganapathi is a graduate from IIT Madras. He is also a charter member at Tie (The Indus Entrepreneur).
This technology cannot come too soon into production. for example, in iraq, i have suggested to a number of military strategists that the way to get a handle on insurgent activities is to digitize the population and track them to filter out terrorists from regular people who just want to get on with their lives. so, embedded RFID identity cards and license tags can be used to track people passively like the way we do with cars using ezpass technology. if the mems fingerprint technology is combined with RFID identity cards, then people can match their encoded fingerprint to a fresh print taken at any check point to see if it is a match. if not then the person is an imposter.
Posted by: dr mitchel w eisenstein | September 08, 2006 at 09:40 PM
Hi,
we need more than 100 fingerprint sensor with below mentioned technical specification.
FBM TECHNICAL SECIFICATION
1 FINGERPRINT SENSOR TYPE: HIGGH QUALITY OPTICAL SENSOR RESOLUTION : MINIMUM
500DPI
2 SENSOR AREA AVERAGE THUMB SIZE OF AN ADULT hul)Hll1
3 AUTHENTICATION TIME 1:l MATCHING LESS THAN1 SECONDl:N MATCHING LESS THAN 2
SeGONDS
4 FALSE REJECTION RATIO 0.0llX)
(FRR)
5 FALSE ACCEPTANCE RATIO 0.001%
(FAR)
6 NO. USERS (ENROLMENT) 1000(TWO DIFFERENT FINGERS OF EVERY USERS SHALL BE
REGISTERED AND THREE SAMPLE FINGERPRINT TELPATES SHALL
BE RECORDED IN THE FBM FOR EVERY FINGER)
7 D A TA STORAGE CAPACITY 50000 TRANSACTIONS(DATA SHOULD BE STORE AS PER THE
CRRANSATION mC’11ory ) FIFO LOGIC i.e. AFTER UTILISATION OF THE CAPACITY NEW
TRANSATIONS WILL OVERWRITE THE VERY FIRST
TRANSACTIONS AND SO ON)
8 LCD DISPLAY GRAPHICS LCD DISPLAY WITH BACK LIGHT LANGUAGE: ENGLISH
9 KEY PAD NUMERIC KEY PAD WITH VARIOUS FUNCTION KEY LIKE MENU.
SCROLLING UP KEY. SCROLLING DOWN KEY. ENTER/OK KEY FOR
CONFIRMATION KEY, C, JlCEllATION KEY ETC
10 LED INDICATORS MINIMUM TWO : RED AND GREEN LED INDICATORS WILL GIVE
INDICATION ABOUT POWER SUPPLY STATUS AS WELL AS
TRANSACTIONS EVENTS SUCCESSFULLY/ UNSUCCESSFULLY
11 AUDIO OUTPUT MINIMUM 2W
12 CONNECTIVITY PORT USB 2.0
13 OPERATING “1em Pc j’ ziture l 0”C TO 5 90 C
14 OPERATING HUMIDITY <90% R l l
15 CASING ABS CASING
16 OPERATING MODE STANDALONE
17 l;FINGERPRINT VERIFICATION AUTO ADOPT FUNCTION
Kindly quote the best of price and with catlogue of the product
Regards,
Jitendra Thakkar
Sai InfoSystem (India) Ltd.
DID : ++ 91 79 30110515
Fax : ++ 91 79 26763072
MSN : [email protected]
Skype : rachhu_sis
www.saicare.com
Posted by: jitendra thakkar | May 09, 2008 at 03:36 AM
what is fingerprint sensor minimum???..thanks..
Posted by: john | March 27, 2009 at 04:34 PM