Identity? No more crisis

WHEN the British government was
debating as to whether or not it should
introduce identity cards, it had several
options before it. The cards could be
made available on a voluntary basis or
driving licences with photos could double as identity cards. The third option
was to make it compulsory for everyone
to carry a government card which
carries all personal details. Smart
cards could be used to store a wide
range of pictorial and textual information. But these could be issued only at a
relatively high cost. Certain recent
developments seem to have brought
these cards within the British
government's reach.

Motorola, the US communications
giant has linked up with Matsushita of
Japan and bought the Indala
Corporation, an electronics company in
San Hose, California, to offer a new
memory technology which cuts the cost
of memory storage. Kodak IBM have also
developed a 'hypercompression' system
that stores photographs in such a small
memory space that even a magnetic
credit card can carry the owner's electronic picture (Everyday with Practical
Electronics, August, 1995).

Existing memory cards either have a
built-in battery to data inside volatile
Random Access Memory (RAM) or use
high current to write to a non-volatile
memory - the Electrically Eraseable
Programmable Read Only Memory
(EEPROM). The new material, YI is a ferroelectric ceramic material similar to a
high temperature superconductor.
When formed into a honeycomb lattice
of individual cells, the cells store bits of
digital code as isolated pits of capacitive
charge. The written charge pattern
remains permanent until a fresh writing
current is applied.

The YI theory was proposed five
years ago by researchers at the
University of Colorado but Matsushita
developed and patented a way of making a cell matrix by a technique similar
to that used to fabricate microchips
from silicon wafers. The Indala
Corporation then worked out a way of
using the matrix inside a credit card or
resin button, along with a miniature
radio transponder and aerial made from
400 turns of very thin wire. The matrix
uses the power of an interrogation signal to send back a response signal which
is coded to carry whatever information
is in the memory. Motorola and Indala
design the YI cell structures which
Matsushita fabricates in Osaka, Japan.

"It is very nearly the perfect
memory material," says Rudyard Istvan,
the Motorola president of Indala. "But if
you do not use exactly the right recipe
for the mix, the cake turns out flat."

YI reads and writes almost instantaneously while RAM, Flash and EEPROM
take one second to read each kilobite of
data. Also, Flash and EEPROM memories
fail after they have been written and
erased a few hundred thousand times. YI
survives a billion cycles.

Says Istvan: "We have already
thought of fusing the system to store
electronically compressed photographs.
You could walk through passport control without taking the card out of your
pocket. The only way to counterfeit
cards would be to build a silicon wafer
fabrication plant and modify it for YI
processing".