Mar 10 -- Phoenix Technologies Ltd. and Atmel Corp. announced last week the integration of Atmel's FingerChip biometric security solutions in Phoenix FailSafe and SecureCore Pre-boot Authentication (PBA) products.
This cooperative design effort between the two companies provides for stronger multifactor authentication and enhanced security and is designed to bring security solutions, including theft-deterrence and tracking for mobile PCs.
Phoenix FailSafe, a built-in theft-deterrence platform for next-generation laptops, will enable secure, remote tracking of fingerprint sensor data in the event of laptop theft/loss. Phoenix SecureCore PBA integrated with Atmel's FingerChip biometric solutions provides for biometric user authentication at the pre-boot level, providing higher levels of security, since fingerprints demand a user's presence and cannot be shared, stolen or written down.
Phoenix Technologies is a global provider of system firmware that provides a secure foundation for computing environments. Phoenix delivers solutions that help users differentiate their systems, reduce time-to-market and increase their revenues. Its AwardCore, SecureCore, FailSafe and HyperSpace, are revolutionizing the PC user experience by delivering better security, reliability and ease-of-use. Phoenix is headquartered in Milpitas, California with offices worldwide.
Atmel is a global vendor involved in the design and manufacture of microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency (RF) components. Leveraging a broad intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, Atmel is able to provide the electronics industry with complete system solutions focused on consumer, industrial, security, communications, computing and automotive markets.
Atmel offers a range of fingerprint-based biometric solutions for PC platforms, based on its patented FingerChip Fingerprint sensors. These solutions offer image quality, biometric performance and security. Phoenix SecureCore PBA requires a user to authenticate identity before the computer boots up. It also enables user authentication from core systems software, also known as BIOS or firmware, to the operating system directly, to achieve single sign-on into the Windows O/S environment.
"Combining FingerChip solutions with the Phoenix products provides an added layer of security which is vital for many enterprise and consumer markets demanding increased security and privacy for stored data and logical access," said Bruno Charrat, Director for Atmel Biometrics Business Unit. "Our collaboration with Phoenix Technologies ensures the highest level of secure authentication -- an increasingly important factor for any PC user. Moving forward, we expect to see other collaborative initiatives by Atmel and Phoenix, dedicated to bringing the best-in-class security solutions to the PC market."
"Our work with Atmel to integrate their fingerprint sensors in our FailSafe theft-deterrence platform enables an additional layer of tracking methodology for mobile PCs. We not only want to provide critical next-generation functionality to our PC OEM customers but also embed certain features that will deter laptop theft," said Surendra Arora, Vice President of Business Development at Phoenix Technologies. "Additionally, our PBA collaboration with Atmel will ensure that our EFI and UEFI-based SecureCore BIOS continues its feature-set dominance in the industry."
