Prototypes & Products

You will find hereafter the FingerChip devices, prototypes or products, designed and developped by the FingerChip team within Thomson-CSF, then Atmel. Well, my memory is not so good, so some mistakes may occured, sorry about that.

This photo illustrates the gap between the first FingerChip swipe sensor, and the latest generation: the first was a slow chip, with a large pixel area to make sure to acquire enough fingerprint data for recognition.

Date pixels Description data sheet
Infrared camera 1995 128x128 first images with the uncooled infrared camera, converted into a fingerprint sensor FingerChip
FC8x8 1996 160x160 first square fingerprint thermal sensor FingerChip icon
FC2x17 1997 40x350 first swipe sensor in the world FingerChip icon
FC15A140 1998 30x280 industrial version of the sweep fingerprint sensor FingerChip
FCD4B14 AT77C101 1999 8x280 integrated analog to digital converter, 5 volts FingerChip icon icon icon
AT77C102 2001 8x280 clone version of the C101 in a new CMOS process, 3.3 volts FingerChip icon icon
AT77C103 2002 8x248 First fingeprint sensor with integrated USB interface FingerChip icon
Mini-clone 2003 8x128 same as the AT77C102, excepted the width: only 128 pixels. FingerChip
AT77C104 2003 8x232 SPI interface, navigation and click detection FingerChip icon
AT77C105 2005 8x232 clone version of the C104 with extended I/O voltage range (1.8v-3.3V) FingerChip icon
AT77C108 2007 6x192 low power consumption, low cost, navigation and click, wake-up, molded package FingerChip icon
AT77C109 2008 6x192 integrated USB interface, navigation and click, wake-up, encryption, fake finger detection, molded package... FingerChip icon

And what about the C106 and C107? Ah! Around 2005, we started the design of chips that integrates a reconstruction algorithm, to save throughput rate and memory for applications. The chips reached the emulation stage, but it was decided not to go further.