FPC and Infineon Achieve Biometric Matching On Single SE for Payment Cards

Fingerprint Cards has reached an important milestone in its efforts to pioneer biometric payment card technology. The company has enabled biometric authentication to be conducted entirely within Infineon’s Secure Element.

The companies achieved success by combining Fingerprints’ T2 sensor module – designed specifically for payment card integrations – with Infineon’s SLC38 security controller. To make that possible, Fingerprint Cards reduced the memory requirements of its software, allowing its module to be shrunk down to a size at which it could fit into Infineon’s 40nm Secure Element.

The result is a streamlined solution for biometric payment cards that could prove appealing to card makers.

“Multi-interface security controller SLC38BML with best-in-class RF performance and computation power allows a full on card fingerprint authentication in combination with Fingerprints’ sensor without integration of an extra microcontroller,” explained Tolgahan Yildiz, Infineon’s Head of Product Line Payment and Ticketing Solutions. “This substantially reduces system development and manufacturing complexity alongside lowering material costs for biometric smart cards.”

The companies say that their joint solution offers a latency time for full biometric verification of just ~250ms, with a False Acceptance Rate of one in 20,000 authentication attempts and a False Rejection Rate of less than three percent of authentication attempts.

For FPC, the development is potentially very significant as it seeks to solidify its presence in the growing biometric payment cards market. In announcing the Secure Element solution, Fingerprints noted that almost one in two payment cards globally feature an Infineon security controller.

The announcement comes a little over a year after FPC and Infineon first announced their partnership. Infineon has also worked with another fingerprint biometrics specialist in the biometric payment cards space, Zwipe, which published a demo of its own Single Silicon Biometric System on Card solution earlier this year.