The timing seems to be just about right for Fidelica, a Milpitas, Calif.-based maker of fingerprint recognition tools for electronic security and access control. The field of biometrics — technologies that use biological features such as fingerprint, face or iris recognition to identify an individual — is receiving attention, especially after the terrorists attacks of Sept 11. Fidelica, benefiting from the increased interest, has raised $6 million and will close $10 million from investors such as Shugart Ventures, EastGate Capital Management, Band of Angels and China Technology Ventures in December.

New Technology
S.K. Ganapathi, Fidelica’s president and CEO, belives that the proprietary technology that his company has developed rivals all fingerprint authentication devices in the market in terms of both functionality as well as in price. Additonally, as the device is essentially a chip roughly 15 mm by 16 mm in size, it is not a bulky stand alone product and can be easily embedded or incorportaed into keyboards and touchpads on a laptop.

Ganapathi explains that current technologies measure the distance between the finger and the sensor surface and then translate that measurement into an image. But a human finger is made up of ridges and valleys, and when placed on the sensor surface those miniscule valleys are not in touch with the surface of the sensor. By measuring the gap between those parts that are not touching the top of the recognition device and the sensor surface, current technologies are essentially gathering redundant, extraneous information. According to Ganapathi, the cumulative effect of these measurements leads to a distortion of the fingerprint image, reducing reliability of the authentication tool, once the finger is exposed to “environmentally induced sub-optimal conditions.” In other words, if a person has been caught in the rain and places a finger on an authentication device, the image produced will not match the one entered in the device’s database. This is because the thin film of water is an added layer that is included in the measurement of the distance between the finger and the sensor surface, making the image appear distorted.

Fidelica has solved this nagging problem, Ganapathi says, by developing a pressure sensing technology that measures the pressure each part of the finger exerts on the surface of the authentication tool, ignoring the valleys that are not in contact with it, instead of recording the distance.

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