Graduated: 1980, Industrial Engineering
What is AuthenTEC?
The company was founded in 1998. It is a spin-off of a company called Harry Semiconductor now called Interstel. I was Vice President of a division there, and this was a project within my division. Myself and the guy I generally refer to as the “smart guy” started the company and made the technology into a product we could sell.
Generally speaking, we’re a semiconductor company that builds fingerprint sensors that read your fingerprint and will replace your passwords, pins and keys for such applications as PCs, mobile phones and home security systems — those are the three biggest markets right now. Longer term, we have an opportunity in automotives and even consumer products.
So what is new about fingerprinting?
The technology is something called TruePrint, which is this RS field tech that when you put your finger on it, it reads through the outer layer of your skin to the live layer, where we like to say the true print resides. The idea there is if we want it to be on everything, every PC, every cell phone, every home security system, every car, the tech had to work for everyone.
Prior technology only works with the surface layer of skin, so if your finger is dirty or greasy — also problems with dry fingers or old person’s fingers — those technologies didn’t work with those fingers, and that affected anywhere from 5-15% of the population at any given time. Our technology gets through those issues on the outer layer, goes right to the live layer and can read anybody’s fingerprint. So that was the foundation of the company, and it still is. It is a very unique, aggressively patented technology.
How will this benefit me?
We play to both security and convenience, for example HP put it on all of their commercial/enterprise laptops and most of their super laptops. So, what happens is: 1) It protects the physical aspect. It can’t be booted up, it has to be your fingerprint. 2) For places that use your password, like MySpace or eBay, ect., you can just swipe your finger so you never have to remember a password or username again.
It also does things like file encryption so nobody can get into that program or file even if they get on your desktop. For a cell phone, it is used for similar applications. If somebody takes your phone they can’t turn it on or they can’t get to your contact list or files, etc.
Password replacement is the big application in PCs. In cell phones, e-commerce is the big application. In a number of places in Asia, the biggest being Japan, your phone is your credit card. You don’t have a credit card, you don’t have a debit card. You just carry around your phone and it’s a technology that links the phone to the POS terminal. So instead of sliding a card through a terminal to process the sale you hold up your phone, go up to a vending machine and instead of using change use your phone and authenticate it with your fingerprint.
Where can I put it?
It is one of the few technologies that has the ability to be ubiquitous and virtually on everything. Technology just happens sometimes. When I bought my first PC for home somebody tried to sell me a 10 MB hard drive and I was like ‘What would I use that for?’ A year later you couldn’t buy a PC without a hard drive, and that would be a ridiculous concept today.
So, technology once it goes it ramps exceedingly fast and I think that is the position we are in now, anything that uses the password, key combination lock can be replaced with a fingerprint system.
So, how does this make you feel?
We’re happy. I tell the team all the time saying that we have won in the market at this time is saying that we won the first inning of a baseball game — really nobody cares. The opportunity we think is one to two billion units a year. We are the leader in the market right now. We’re 60 percent market share, but when this market is a half billion or billion piece then we can be proud of saying we are 60 percent market share
How safe are these fingerprints?
If you look at a 4-digit pin, that is usually considered a false accepted of 1 in 10,000, so there is a 1 in 10,000 chance you would guess my pin. But it really isn’t that because people tend to use their birthdays, their names. They write them down on yellow stickys, don’t remember them.
Generally, the accuracy of a fingerprint sensor is 1 in 1,000,000, so 1,000,000 bad people have to try your laptop to try to steal it — so that is one of the key elements of the security accuracy. The other element is the whole convenience. They are always telling you you have a long password, make it alphanumeric, don’t write it down — but nobody can remember it and you end up having for one Web site you don’t use that frequently a bunch of passwords.
So, there is a combination of security and convenience which is very good because it is tied directly to you, and its easier than carrying around keys or credit cards or trying to remember passwords or pins. Usually the most secure something is made the less convenient it is, but fingerprint sensors have brought those two together.
How did your education at State help you?
It was huge. My engineering degree has helped me even though I’m not designing. Although I did not make an electrical design of my own I understood what everybody was talking about.
At State I had a lot of opportunity to look around at a lot of different programs, there are a lot of kids that come into school that have no idea what they want to do or what they want to be and State has a lot of opportunity to look around and decide what you want to go in to.
