Technology advancements are paradoxical. Why? Because they are both good and bad at the same time. Here's an example, with Hitachi Ltd. announcing a finger vein authentication module as thin as 3mm. Compared with its current (soon to be previous) product, 23.5mm in thickness, the new module is about seven times thinner.

Finger vein authentication is a technology that checks and authenticates finger vein patterns by transmitting near-infrared light through the scanned finger. The probability of a scan error, like recognizing a right person as a stranger is 0.01% for the new 3mm thick module, while vice versa, the possibility to recognize a stranger as the right person goes down to 0.0001%.

It takes about 1 second for the new module to recognize a person, take a picture of the vein pattern and authenticate it. I have mentioned above it's 3mm thick, so I must adde the other dimensions, 30 x 25mm. Hitachi has managed to reduce the thickness that much by developing a new "contactless flat sensor" that uses a contact image sensor, dedicated to taking pictures of finger vein patterns.

It is a CMOS type sensor, with a pixel count of 150 x 100 and each of those pixels features a separate micro-lens array with a 0.1mm pitch between them. Given that, and the fact that only perpendicular light that passes through finger veins are collected by the micro-lens arrays and captured by the CMOS sensor, the fresh module is capable of taking well focused pictures of finger vein patterns.

Hitachi's plans are to start mass production for this module within two years for use in mobile devices such as cellphones.


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