In this paper an intelligent sensor for fingerprint recognition is proposed. The sensor has the objective to overcome some limits of the fingerprint recognition software systems, as elaboration time and security issues related to fingerprint transmission between sensor and processing unit. Intelligent sensor has been prototyped using the Hamster Secugen sensor for image acquisition and the Celoxica RC1000 board, employing a Xilinx VirtexE2000 FPGA, for image processing and analysis. Resources used, elaboration time as well the recognition rates in both verification and identification modes are reported in the paper. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first implementation for a full hardware implemented fingerprint recognition system.