Using biometrics to authenticate a person's identity has several advantages over the present practices of Personal Identification Numbers or passwords. To gain maximum security in the authentication system using biometrics, the computation of the authentication as well as the store of the biometric template has to take place in a smart card. However, it is challenging to integrate biometrics into a smart card because of limited resources such as processing power and memory space. In this paper, we propose an area-time-accuracy efficient hardware design for a fingerprint matching system, which can be integrated into smart card chips. Experimental results show that the match operation can be completed in real time (190ms) on the proposed hardware requiring 36K gates (2.4mm² silicon area by using 0.25µm CMOS technology). Also, an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 3.8% can be obtained by using the proposed hardware solution. For the same operation, a previous software solution with a memory-efficient data structure could be executed only on a state-of-the-art, high-cost smart card and provide an EER of 6.0%.