“We will be rolling out e-passports from the end of the year and our offices will be issuing them by the end of the second quarter next year,” said a spokesman for the Passport Office.
Last week the German government announced Philips as the lead system provider for its e-passport project, and said it would be supplying a chip including 72kbyte of EEPROM. “The high-security chip is specifically designed to fulfil the needs of eGovernment projects,” said Philips, “with its memory capacity able to hold biometric information such as fingerprints and facial images.”
The UK will initially only include facial information in its e-passports, with data coming from a scan of the photo provided for the document, said the spokesman.
“In future the EU will move towards fingerprints. We [the UK] are not actually bound to do this but we are likely to before the decade is out,” he said.
Most indications are that the controversial UK ID card will contain facial, fingerprint and iris data, and passport data will eventually be based on this.
“We are not sure if all three will go into the passport,” said the spokesman, adding: “ID cars will not replace passports, although you will be able to use them as travel documents within the EU.”
The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) has set data and data transfer formats for e-passports internationally.
Philips’ chip meets the ISO/IEC14443 standard power and range requirements and is available in a 320µm flat MOB4 package for passport use.
Autor: Steve Bush
Quelle: ElectronicsWeekly, 07.06.2005
