One of the main identity authentication methods is the use of fingerprints. The most popular biometric method is fingerprint analysis. Most of the automatic fingerprint systems are based on minutiae matching. Therefore, extraction of minutiae is a critical stage in the design of fingerprint authentication systems. Computation of direction of lines in fingerprints is a stage which affects the quality of the extracted minutiae. The existing algorithms require complex and time-consuming computations and are software-based. This paper presents a hardware implementation which has improved the current methods. The presented method is based on pipeline architecture and has proved to perform efficiently.