UPEK (www.upek.com) offers the full range of capabilities needed to deliver end-to-end biometric fingerprint authentication solutions, including silicon fingerprint sensors, biometric algorithms, companion processors, and client-server application software. Our technology is being used by many partners, including leading notebook and PC peripheral manufacturers - e.g. IBM (now Lenovo), Samsung, MPC, Gateway, Quanta, ASUS. This includes e.g. the fingerprint scanners and software provided with IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads T and X series. Multiple new products from other manufacturers are being prepared.

UPEK's strategy includes Linux support and we already for some time work on software, which will make our technology accessible for the Linux world. Though the development is still in progress, we want to publish this information to both announce our decission to support Linux and to satisfy the increasing number of people asking about availability of this technology.

We will support a development of custom applications through BioAPI technology, for which we will provide our own BSP module. For now, the supported BioAPI is the version 1.1. We will not provide the source code for our BSP module, as it contains proprietary technology we do not intend to publish. We will also not publish nor make available the low-level USB interface to our device, for the same reason. However, the BSP itself will be fully compatible with BioAPI framework and therefore our technology will be easily usable through the standard BioAPI interface.

The release is currently expected in September 2005. The list of supported Linux distributions will be made available later.