Biometric Access Secure Touch (STAm)

The Biometric Access Company (now thinENGINE Computers) Secure Touch unit has grown to cover a multitude of markets that require positive identification of individuals, from time and attendance stations, to authorized room access, to retail sales and check cashing applications. Many of these applications require customer and product information to complete the transaction, whether it is admittance to a health care facility or purchase of bar-coded packages and check acceptance at a grocery store. Units can be customized with a finger scanner, keypad, magnetic stripe reader and display.

The base module consists of the system board, the 20 key keypad and 128x64 pixel (8 lines x 21 characters) graphical display, magnetic credit card reader, 3 SD card slots for memory expansion and non-volatile removable memory, 10/100Mb/s Ethernet port, 2 USB 2.0 host ports, a USB 2.0 OTG port, and 3 serial ports. The Blackfin processor has 32MB of SDRAM and 8 MB of FLASH RAM. All of the input and output devices are connected to the system by means of the Blackfin Parallel Peripheral Interface (PPI) which is a 16 b, 65Mhz clocked parallel bus which provides sufficient bandwidth to operate the devices concurrently. The system uses the Ethernet link to connect to the server for network communication in support of efficient and effective data gathering, data aggregation and data distribution for transaction processing at the point of service.

The Ethernet connection is a 100Mb/s link, and the processor is fast enough to use all of this bandwidth, creating a very fast communication path from the terminal to the server. The server contains the finger image 'signatures' of valid system users for applications that require positive ID verification. When a user/customer scans his fingertip, a 'signature' template is created locally in the SecureTouch hardware and sent to the server to be compared with a stored master 'signature' template to verify identities.

See also: thinENGINE Secure Touch (STAm)