Touchless fingerprinting scanner

The use of fingerprints for personal identification dates back to the ninetieth century, while its digital integration into every day devices is relatively new. Almost 350 million fingerprint sensors will be shipped next year only for consumer electronics applications, for a market worth around 10 B€ globally. With the world progressively going digital, digital security is the main concern and our daily experience highlights two main issues with respect to fingerprint sensors. Reliability of the fingerprint sensor is a major issue, as capacitive fingerprint sensors can be easily spoofed. Form factor is another one: fingerprint sensors take a vital space of the display, challenging the ongoing trend of borderless consumer electronics. That is why the electronics industry is searching for a new technology to create a 3D image of the fingerprints, which is more secure, energy efficient and seamlessly integrated in the device. At Piemacs, we have developed a novel technology to realise a fingerprint sensor based on ultrasounds that can scan a fingerprint through a surface, having high accuracy yet at prototypal stage, and also discriminating live from dead fingers. This provides utmost reliability and allows the sensor to be embedded underneath the display or the user interface of any device. The DigitUs ultrasonic sensor is based on a piezoelectric thin film proposed within the FET-OPEN project BioWings, whose main goal is to realise a vibrating membrane that emits ultrasound waves into a liquid flowing through a channel. Piemacs’ solution is based on PZT, a piezoelectric material which is at least 10 times stronger than the materials currently used for integrated ultrasound scanners and which can be readily integrated into MEMS, paving the way to the adoption of the solution into mainstream applications. Besides, the technology has the possibility to be integrated under many different materials such as glass, polymers and even some metals.