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UPEK Points Finger at Sony
By Suzanne Deffree -- Electronic News, 9/20/2005
STMicroelectronics spin-off UPEK has pointed its finger at consumer electronics and at CE giant Sony.
The company recently announced that it would supply Sony with its fingerprint scanning biometrics technology for a new line of VAIO notebooks, the BX series, targeting the enterprise level. The deal follows one made by UPEK with Lenovo, the China-based company that recent bought IBM’s ThinkPad brand.
“Certainly one of the compelling value propositions of this technology is it can be used for a very wide range of applications and one of the starting propositions is managing passwords in the notebook space,” Alan Kramer, president and CEO of UPEK, said.
But Kramer’s ambitions for the 2004-spin-off and its TouchChip and TouchStrip brands is to go beyond the enterprise notebook space, targeting mobile consumer devices, a market that seems to be growing coincidently in popularity and in the amount of data carried.
“A second trend we are seeing is people are carrying around more and more data,” the CEO said. “If you look at the range of stuff Sony sells – everything from cell phones to music players – all of those devices are target devices for our type of technology.
“Obviously a big company like Sony wants to test a new technology and get confidence in it before they would consider such a wide deployment,” he said, noting that for the time being the CE giant is sticking strictly with laptops for use of UPEK technologies, but adding that CE offers a viable and large market for the Berkley, Calif.-based company. “That’s certainly one of the things we find very exciting about Sony and that allows us an opportunity to go beyond what Lenovo offers us, limited to the PC space.”
The security solutions offered by UPEK under the TouchChip and TouchStrip brands began shipping in 2000 and combine fingerprint sensing, fingerprint matching and security protocols into fully integrated fingerprint modules. The technology is based on silicon, an easy substrate to add additional sensing capability to without adding large amounts of cost and a good sensor base for signals like chemicals and blood flow through skin.
Kramer estimated that about 5 percent of notebooks will ship with fingerprint biometrics this year. He expects that amount to jump to 20 percent next year, however, as UPEK and other companies in the field begin to branch out. In addition to Lenovo and Sony, UPEK will soon announce an agreement with NEC to serve the pan-European market, offering UPEK TouchStrip technology in three new Versa models.
Overall, the fingerprint biometrics market is expected to see a compound annual growth rate of 35.3 percent, growing from $344 million in 2004 to $1.56 billion in 2009, according to Frost and Sullivan data.
