Wednesday, May 21, 1997

Smart-card industry expanding, trade show indicates

By RICHARD BURNETT

The Orlando Sentinel

ORLANDO, Fla. - Makers of smart-card technology held a high-tech parade Tuesday at the Orange County Convention Center.

In its annual trade show, the nation's smart-card industry displayed a dizzying array of advances in high-tech plastic, which uses embedded microchips to store and transmit data.

From retail trade and banking to corporate security and health care, smart-card companies are taking aim at almost every aspect of life. The cards are about the same size as standard credit cards.

There were cards for secure Internet commerce, face identification and fingerprint verification. Also present were sensors, decoders, microchip embedders, cutters and a host of machines involved in making and reading smart cards.

Organizers said a record 7,000 are attending the CardTech/SecurTech conference, which ends Thursday. That showing indicates how fast the smart-card business is growing, officials said.

"There is a sense now that smart cards are gaining public acceptance," said David P. Anastasi, one of the conference speakers and an executive with U.S. West Communications Inc. in Seattle. "The success of the Internet has helped. Years ago, nobody believed that would ever take off the way it has."

More than 60 countries are represented at the trade show. The roster includes U.S. giants such as Motorola, Visa, Unisys and Polaroid, as well as foreign conglomerates such as Sony, Toshiba and Hitachi.

Melbourne, Fla.-based Harris Corp. also is weighing in with its offering - a high-speed fingerprint identification system, which could be used in tandem with smart-card technology.

The fingerprint machine - known as FingerLoc - is a commercial spinoff from a system Harris built for the FBI, company officials said. Harris' semiconductor division in Melbourne developed their version of the technology.

Smart-card microchips can store fingerprints, hand geometry, documents, records and thousands of other pieces of data, industry officials said. In the future, as chips become more sophisticated, they could store full-motion video.

"Today's chips are already more capable than computers were 20 years ago," said Thomas R. Brown, an accounts manager for Westinghouse Security Electronics, based in Houston. "As the technology continues to go forward, the capabilities will only be limited by what the public really wants."