NTT prepares new smart card, fingerprint technologies

TOKYO — Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) is developing new smart card and fingerprint sensor technologies that could bring greater convenience to various types of security application, the company said Thursday during an open day at its Yokosuka research and development center west of Tokyo.

NTT has developed a combined contact and contactless smart card system that allows administrators to update information on the smart card chip remotely over the Internet, said Michel Faure, an NTT research specialist.

Updates can be made by connecting the card to a reader which in turn connects to a central administration server, Faure said. The card contains both public and private key encryption based on the popular DES (Data Encryption Standard) algorithm.

NTT has put 1MB of flash memory in the chip, enough to store applications for authenticating users, making payments and the like. NTT has also put the chip into a miniSD memory card that could be plugged into a compatible mobile phone or PDA (personal digital assistant), said Hiroaki Kuroki, senior research engineer with NTT’s smart card applications division.

NTT has produced sampes of the smart card chip and is testing them in mobile phones for applications such as contactless payment systems, the company said. The system is compatible with the ISO 14443-2 type B standard for radio frequency power and signal interface, Faure said.

Phones that can be used to make payments and store airline tickets are already available in Japan using a security chip developed by Sony. The big difference with NTT’s system is that the chips can be upgraded over the Internet to include new applications or updated security standards.

NTT is in talks with Japanese public authorities, corporations and transport companies about possible use of its chip, as well as with systems integrators in Europe and the U.S., Faure said.

NTT has also developed a capacitor-type one-chip fingerprint sensor that uses about one tenth the power of comparable sensors available commercially, said Hiroki Morimura, senior research engineer at NTT Microsystem Integration Laboratories.

Capacitor-type sensors “read” the ridges and troughs of a fingerprint through variations in the electrical charges produced where the finger touches the sensor. Such sensors usually use three chips, a sensor chip, a processor and a memory chip, said Morimura.

NTT’s sensor only uses one NTT-developed custom chip and this has cut power consumption to about 20 milliwatts, about a tenth of that needed for sensors with multiple chips. The sensor can run for a year on a standard 3-volt lithium ion “button” battery, he said.

Possible uses include securing access to PDAs and mobile phones, and even controlling access to a personal mail box outside the home.

By only using one chip, the cost of the sensor can be lowered to about $50, half that of capacitor-type sensors on sale now, Morimura said. The sensor is 11 millimeters by 15mm by 1.4mm and has a resolution of 128 pixels by 128 pixels, according to NTT.

NTT Electronics, which is part of the NTT group of companies, will start making samples of the sensor chip in April, and it should be available for commercial use by the middle of the year, Morimura said.