IDEX Explains How TrustedBio Reduces Manufacturing Cost of Biometric Cards

IDEX Biometrics believes that its TrustedBio sensor will be the sensor of choice for the next generation of biometric payment cards. To support that argument, the company has detailed some of the design features that distinguish its sensors from those of the competition.

In doing so, IDEX called particular attention to the chip and the polymer substrate used to connect the sensor to the biometric card. Unlike its competitors, TrustedBio uses off-chip sensing, which is to say that the surface of the sensor (the part that the user will actually touch to complete a scan) has been separated from the chip itself. Such designs are common in the tech industry, and are employed in the touch screens in smartphones and other devices.

The advantage of that design is that it allows manufacturers to reduce the size of the chip without reducing the size of the sensing surface area. As a result, developers can reap the benefits of Moore’s law, which in turn reduces manufacturing and integration costs since developers can deliver more computational power with fewer raw materials.

On the other hand, a design that links the sensor surface into the actual chip cannot reduce its hardware footprint without sacrificing utility. A smaller sensor will not be able to pick up enough information to perform an accurate match, so developers are locked into a form factor with higher resource demands.

TrustedBio places its chip below a polymer substrate and turns that substrate into the sensing area. Traditional sensors, meanwhile, place the chip and the sensing surface above that polymer substrate. Thanks to those innovations, IDEX has delivered a sensor with a chip with an area of less than 10 square mm and a sensing area of 90 square mm. In contrast, its competitors need a 40 square mm chip to deliver a sensing area of only 36.

With that in mind, IDEX argues that more card manufacturers will opt for TrustedBio in their third generation designs. The company has already partnered with Zwipe and IDEMIA, and is currently working with Zwipe to market a joint solution that combines TrustedBio with Zwipe’s own Pay ONE software platform.

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January 11, 2020 – by Eric Weiss