Biometrics: Dale Setlak
Identifying with engineering

Any engineer who has ever had an idea and spent late nights and weekends working to make it come true, can relate to Dale Setlak. Setlak turned a "pie-in-the-sky" idea for a chip that reads fingerprints into a product and a new business venture for Harris Corp. (Melbourne, Fla.).

Setlak is vice president and chief research officer of a Harris spin-off, AuthenTec Inc., which is commercializing FingerLoc, the fingerprint-authentication system Setlak developed. FingerLoc is an integrated-circuit fingerprint reader and software for the PC. The system combines biometric technology with imaging and data-processing techniques to provide a complete personal-identification and security system.

The technology Setlak dreamed of, and the company he helped build, is part of an emerging market for fingerprint-recognition chips and other biometric technologies that will be used in computer and electronic-device security.

As fingerprint-chip technology improves and production costs decrease, Setlak envisions future generations of FingerLoc chips embedded in different electronic devices from cellular phones and handheld computers to television remote controls, automobiles and home lock systems.

AuthenTec plans production of the first-generation FingerLoc chips to begin in early 1999 and is lining up PC and other device manufacturers interested in embedding the chip into products.

It's light years away from Setlak's days as a college student at Ohio State, where he wrote music and played guitar in a rock band to pay his tuition.

The connecting link is the creative process engineers and musicians go through when they invent something. It's a process that involves toil, inspiration and perseverance.

"When you solve an engineering problem, you look at all the different ways of going about it," said Setlak, who has tinkered with electrical-engineering projects since the age of 11. "Ideas come a little at a time, but there is a point where something clicks and all the ideas fall together."

Setlak said he rarely has time to compose music and play guitar, since work and single parenting consume his days. But Setlak never forgot the lessons that years of music training and an electrical-engineering degree taught him.

He has used the same method to solve a variety of engineering problems in the course of his career-automating steel mills, designing electronic musical instruments, building controls for a nuclear-power plant and designing parts of the Space Station. But none of those jobs involved so much risk and relied so much on gut intuition as designing a chip that reads fingerprints and founding a company on it.

The idea for the FingerLoc chip began in 1995, while Setlak was working on computer systems for electronic patient records. Setlak realized there was no way to know who accessed and updated the records on those systems.

Instead of using passwords forgotten by users, or easily cracked by hackers, Setlak thought using personal identifying information, a biometric technology, to control access to such computer systems would make them secure.

Setlak searched for a biometric that would work and chose fingerprinting technology since it has proven successful in prisons and law-enforcement agencies.

Before setting out to design the chip, Setlak tested the accuracy of state-of-the-art optical-based fingerprint scanners. He took the scanners to hospital emergency rooms and found the scanners worked on 50 percent of the people tested. "We realized the existing technology didn't work on everyone and that prisons and law-enforcement populations were relatively uniform populations of males between the ages of 18 and 36, whose fingerprints were in relatively good condition," said Setlak.

Fingerprints are harder to image on some people. As people age, they often lose the lipid (fat) layer in their skin and their fingerprints become worn and difficult to image. It's also often difficult to image fingerprints from people with very small hands and fingers, people who work with their hands, or those who have injuries or scars.

Classical fingerprint-sensing technology is based on capacitive sensing. It consists of a silicon-integrated circuit containing an array of capacitive sensor plates. A capacitive sensor measures the capacitive difference between the dead-skin layer and air space, which is actually a measure of moisture on the finger, not a fingerprint.

It's this measure of moisture rather than the fingerprint that often leads to problems imaging someone's print. Anyone with dry skin, of a certain age when the skin loses moisture, anyone with dirt, oil or other contaminant on his hand would have a problem using traditional capacitive fingerprint sensors.

Setlak believed fingerprint-recognition technology would not "take off" until it worked for everyone, so he set out to develop a different kind of fingerprint sensor.

Setlak, who at the time worked for Harris' Electronic System Sector doing system integration and software design, collaborated with antenna engineers in the defense-systems unit at Harris Corporation and he talked to engineers in Harris' semiconductor division about his idea.

"At first, there was a lot of incredulity from chip designers when I told them I wanted to build a chip that people would put their finger on," said Setlak.

Setlak's perseverance paid off and eventually he found engineers who agreed to work on the idea. Nick Van Vonough was the semiconductor engineer at Harris who knew the semiconductor-fabrication technology, understood what it meant to put a finger on silicon and found ways to make it practical, including a patented coating that protects the chip from harsh environmental conditions.

Meanwhile, Setlak worked with the antenna engineers at Harris and created an electric-field antenna array device that contains 16,000 small, high-impedance antennas on top of a ground plane. "The chip is fundamentally an antenna and it's flexible so you can change the electrical parameter and how it operates," Setlak explained.

The FingerLoc chip is designed to detect the ridges and valleys in the live layer (below the surface) of skin cells. When a finger is placed on the chip, a small RF voltage is applied, and a series of electrical potential events are measured. These events result in the replication of the conductive skin layer and the translation of electrical potentials from that layer into voltages representing the fingerprint.

"The signal goes to the conductive layer of skin, below the surface, and all the antennas work at the same time and together to generate linear coherent electric fields," Setlak said. The linear electric field is what lets the FingerLoc system measure the ridges and valley of a fingerprint on live or active skin.

Setlak said the team had to build software that enabled the sensor to adapt to different skin conditions and learn to configure the system for optimum effectiveness, so that it wouldn't inappropriately reject too many subjects or accept everyone who was tested.

While Setlak was working on his fingerprint-chip project, things were changing at Harris. It was 1996, and Phillip W. Farmer, Harris' new chairman, president and chief executive, issued a directive that encouraged cross-development across the company's business sectors.

"Here you had this ESS guy talking to the antenna folks and the semiconductor folks, and this was just what the company had in mind," Setlak related. Because it illustrated how the divisions within Harris could collaborate on a product, Harris began to support the effort.

"Before that, it was a skunkworks thing I was doing quietly," said Setlak, who often spent late nights drawing diagrams, reading graphs and evaluating simulations that illustrated the feasibility of the chip.

'Management champion'
It was around that same time that Scott Moody, president of Harris Semiconductor Group's Core Products business unit (cores, communications, power), became interested in the technology. "He was our management champion," Setlak said.

"Moody's group put up the money to build the first FingerLoc sensor," Setlak continued. "He had the authority to do it, and he took on the management of the new technology. When the effort was spun out of Harris, he decided to come with us." Moody officially became the president of AuthenTec.

In early 1998, Harris decided the best way to handle a new business was to spin it out as a separate company.

"They felt that as a big, government-systems company, they moved too slowly to really develop the technology and bring it to market, and it was particularly risky because we were going to create a whole new marketplace," said Setlak.

AuthenTec thus became the realization of an engineer's "pie-in-the-sky" idea-and an example of how a single idea can launch a company.

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