Webinar: A silicon-free future
for biometric sensors

We can comfortably produce any sensor within the 25x30mm reticle dimension on our 300mm line. We can also consider larger sensors, but this requires more engineering and becomes more application specific.

We use the same kind of lithographic techniques as the silicon semiconductor industry, so the tools that we use to create the patterning for the different layers can absolutely be used to stitch together side-by-side reticle shots.  

We’ve explored this in multiple contexts – stitching together whole reticles, multi-level masks, printing in a jigsaw style, and so on. All are possible.

Most of the biometric data captured by sensors today is encrypted, so from a user point of view, it’s protected. But this is not our area of expertise. We’re a semiconductor foundry; we simply provide the manufacturing platform. It’s something we’d expect to be addressed by the customer and/or the ecosystem.

The readout circuitry can be part of the FlexIC itself, or a silicon readout chip can be combined with a FlexIC-based array. 

With FlexICs, you can make the sensor much bigger, and capture more data which decreases the complexity of the ASIC that’s doing the heavyweight post-processing and image matching. It also reduces the cost of the sensor itself.

Pragmatic is a hardware manufacturer only. Our products are compatible with software tools for ASIC design, but we don’t provide them.

We can dice the FlexIC to virtually any shape. The thin and flexible nature of FlexICs also provides great advantages at a system level, where the electronics module can be made smaller and more flexible.

Yes, it can be integrated. This is one of the unique attributes of thin/flexible integrated circuits. Generally speaking, there are better ways than sewing to attach chips, and we tend to recommend conventional attach methodologies from the semiconductor industry.

We do not expect image distortion if the sensor conforms to a surface, but this depends on the type of sensing you use. Optical sensors may be more sensitive to the curve while capacitive sensors are unlikely to be impacted.

Our technology is agnostic to the type of sensing, but we have seen value in capacitive as well as pressure sensing. We believe there are also benefits for optical sensing, such as detection in the infrared region. 

In fact, combining two sensing types, such as capacitive and optical, could enable the capture of veins and ridges in the fingerprints, which could bring another level of biometric identification.