The FingerChip project
The FingerChip project started end of 1995.
With the impulse of my boss Daniel, I proposed this crazy project to produce
a biometric (bio-what? at this time...) sensor in a Thomson-CSF unit (TMS) that was
absolutely not in that kind of business, under the form of a fingeprint sensor,
using the same technology than the uncooled infrared-camera
we were producing at this time, so a thermal-based fingerprint sensor.
And moreover, the proposed sensor shape was rather strange: it will look like
a
kind of little bar instead of a the regular square shape, and the user
will be obliged to swipe his/her finger over it! The idea was
too crazy at this time, and I got the authorization to create a regular square sensor
first, immediatly followed by a swipe-type, as described in the
products pages.
So we started to promote and market the idea with some demonstrations, you can see that
in the History page. I have done myself some
promotion tools and weird things around this project:
as we got only some limited resource, everyone was making a lot of different things!
My reflection in a 6" FingerChip wafer :)
Making swipe fingerprint sensor is a cheap solution
for silicon manufacturers, because of the larger number of candidates on one wafer, which cost
is the same whatever the circuit is.