A 15/spl times/15 mm/sup 2/ single-chip fingerprint sensor and identifier using pixel-parallel processing

User authentication using fingerprints is strongly needed to prevent IC cards and mobile equipment from being used illegally. Some semiconductor sensor chips for fingerprint identification have been presented. However, they require a high-performance microprocessor and large memories, which makes it difficult to embed these chips in small, thin devices. Moreover, it is easy to tamper with the personal data in the microprocessor, memory and sensor chips because they are separate. Incorporating a sensor and identifier in a single chip solves these problems. The LSI architecture integrates the sensor and identifier in a single chip, and provides a sensor-unified fingerprint identifying LSI.