The second wave of consumer biometrics is reshaping the VCSEL industry

An article written by Guillaume Girardin, Yole Développement and Sylvain Hallereau, System Plus Consulting for LASER FOCUS WORLD – Fingerprint identification technology still dominates the biometric market, but big changes have come with 3D facial recognition and other photonics-based security applications.

Fingerprint identification was the first biometric technology used for consumers mainly for historical reasons, beginning with the criminal fingerprint database established by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1892 using ink-based techniques. In 2013, it entered mass-adoption status thanks to Apple’s (Cupertino, CA) introduction of Touch ID on the iPhone 5s. Since then fingerprint sensing has remained the most common biometric technology currently used in the consumer space; but probably not for long.

At Yole Développement (Yole), we estimate that the annual revenue generated by fingerprint-based hardware solutions for the consumer market is currently $2.7 billion dollars, representing 57% of the total consumer biometric hardware market ($4.8 billion in 2018)… Full article