Every aspiring 7-year old detective knows that fingerprints are unique. I actually spent six months a few years ago working with a security company, Biogy , which had a biometric USB thumb drive that required a fingerprint to unlock it. I bet you didn't know that Chinese people have the most difficult fingerprints to work with since their ridges are less defined? In the developing world, some of the poorest people on the planet have no form of identification at all. This is a big problem in health care since identification (such as a social security number in the US) is typically used to link healthcare records to the individual. Your fingerprint has the potential to establish who you are, and then what kind of healthcare you might have had in the past, and what you may need in the future, even in the absence of formal documents. That's where Simprints comes in. They are a small non-profit company that primarily delivers software, but they also have to manufacture hardware, too, since they needed a more robust portable fingerprint reader for use on the front line by community healthcare workers. As a company of less than a dozen people, they obviously can't staff those front lines themselves. They work with partners, such as BRAC Health in Bangladesh, which is the largest NGO in the world, who have a pilot program with tens of thousands of people. Another partner, is Possible Health, which works in rural Nepal and allows community health workers to reach people in some of the most difficult-to-reach parts of the mountainous country. One challenge is that the product needs to function in extreme environments. It is tested to IP65, which means it is waterproof and dust-proof. In monsoon areas with workers going door to door, devices get wet, dirty, dropped on the floor, drooled on by babies, chewed by camels, and need to work from -20°C to 70°C. At the end of last year, I wrote about how the board for Raspberry Pi was designed using OrCAD. I don't recommend feeding your Raspberry Pi to babies or camels. But there is something in common with the Simprint fingerprint scanner, namely it was also designed using Cadence's OrCAD PCB design software. Come to think of it, another thing that they both have in common is their roots at Cambridge University (one of my almae matres, where the degree ceremony is still in Latin—hey, after 800 years why change?). Simprints' Giles Hutchison is responsible for getting the fingerprint scanner designed and ramping it into volume production. He considers OrCAD as one of the industry standards for schematic capture and, in fact, he has used it on previous projects earlier in his career, as does the design consultancy company, Fen Technology, that Simprints works with. It is the nature of this sort of design that it requires small incremental changes as the devices goes through the emission and immunity approvals to get through certification. The design of the first generation product was largely subcontracted and they used OrCAD largely for viewing and making those small modifications. But now they are moving onto the second generation, he will become a heavier user. His experience with Cadence's Tech Support has been...non-existent. OrCAD is a mature product and is intuitive to use. He admits he hasn't been stressing it to its limits but, as a result, hasn't had any problems. The second-generation product will look similar to the first generation, since they put a lot of effort into the esthetics. The key difference is to cost-reduce it so that it is cheaper to manufacture. Since their partners have limited budgets, the cheaper the product, the more units that can be deployed. He admits that he has a lot of prior experience with OrCAD, and hasn't really had to look at the documentation in a long time. In fact, his experience goes back to the pre-Windows operating system...and he remembers it being a good product even then. At present, Simprints is using OrCAD for schematic capture alone, with use experts who use it every day for the physical layout. However, as the company becomes larger, they might eventually bring physical layout back in-house. For now, though, outsourcing layout and signal analysis to another OrCAD house makes the most sense. There is more information on Simprints on their website . The Cadence website has more information about OrCAD PCB Design Tools . For high-performance design, information on Allegro and Sigrity is under PCB Design and Analysis Tools .![]()
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