Allowing card manufacturers to address this new growing market segment, Infineon Technologies AG and IDEX Biometrics ASA announced a reference design for the next generation biometric smart card architecture. The reference design leverages the combination of Infineon's new SLC38BML800 security controller with additional GPIO-interfaces and the latest generation of the TrustedBio™ solution from IDEX Biometrics. This enables fingerprint authentication with low latency, high accuracy, and power efficiency.

The integration of the fingerprint sensor, the secure element, power management and communications reduce the complexity of card manufacturing which shortens time to market and lowers costs. TrustedBio delivers fingerprint images with highly accurate authentication results (FRR/FAR and PAD performance) for payment applications. With the performance of the SLC38BML800, biometrically authenticated transactions are accomplished in a market-leading speed of less than 500 milliseconds.

An internal clock frequency of up to 100 MHz not only enables biometric fingerprint card applications, the SLC38BML800 is very well adaptable for payment, ID, and logical and physical access. Customers using this reference design can easily address these and other authenticated applications with rapid time to market. Samples of Infineon's SLC38BML800 security controller can be ordered now, mass production is planned to start at the end of 2021.

A software development kit for the reference design is currently available from IDEX. Samples of IDEX Biometrics' TrustedBio solution are available now, with mass production starting by the end of the third quarter of 2021.