On the design of an embedded biometric smart card reader

In this paper, a highly reliable embedded biometric smart card system with cryptography engine is proposed. We explain the system architecture of portable embedded biometric smart card reader to strengthen security for various consumer applications such as mobile cash card. Proposed biometric smart card system is embedded with 75 MHz 32-bit RISC, 6 channel smart card controller and advanced encryption system (AES) cryptography accelerator. It is devised to communicate with smart card with encrypted biometric data using international standard ISO-7816 and provides system peripherals such as LCD display controller and USB host interface. The proposed implementation shows a 70% performance improvement for decryption of protected biometric data compared to the software based smart card chipset and it is verified using 0.35 um CMOS process.