Recently, the United States Patent and Trademark Office officially granted Apple a patent related to an updated in-screen optical fingerprint sensor. Apple has also secured another design patent for its Vision Pro head-mounted display device.
Most of today's metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) based fingerprint sensors present a challenge with separation of different reflection rays at various angles which leads to a long image capture time. Apple's granted patent presents a solution.
Under-display Optical Fingerprint Sensor With NFV Collimator And TFT/organic Imager
Apple's granted patent relates to an apparatus for fingerprint sensing with a narrow field-of view (NFV) collimator and an organic imager. The apparatus includes a touch-display layer, a collimator layer and a pixelated image sensor. The touch-display layer can be an organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display that is covered by a transparent layer (e.g., a cover glass layer) and can emit light to illuminate a surface touching the transparent layer and allows transmission of reflected light from the surface to underlying layers including the collimator layer and the organic imager. The collimator layer can collimate the reflected light, and the organic imager is a pixelated image sensor that can sense the collimated reflected light.
In one or more implementations, the collimator collimates the reflected light to enable a one-to-one imaging ratio between an area of the finger surface touching the transparent layer and an area of a corresponding image formed on the pixelated image sensor. In other words, the reflected light reaching a pixel of the organic imager through the collimator layer is transmitted through an area of the organic imager approximately equal to an area of the pixel. The pixelated image sensor can be a thin-film transistor (TFT)-based organic imager. In some embodiments, the collimator layer is a fiber-optics plate made of a collection of optical fiber films bundled with an opaque separator material. In one or more implementations, the collimator layer is a micro-aperture plate including transparent glass or resin embedded in an opaque glass or resin material. The collimator layer of the subject technology can achieve a NFV of approximately +/−3 degrees and a transmission within a range of about −6 dB to 0 dB.
In some implementations, a micro-lens layer is formed on top of the micro aperture plate to separate angled illumination reflections. A total feature signal-to-noise ratio (FSNR) value of the touch-display layer and the underlying layers amounts to more than about 12 dB. The surface touching the transparent layer is a surface of a human finger including ridges and valleys, and the collimator layer's purpose is to separate weak reflections resulting from angled illumination of walls of valleys.
Apple's patent FIG. 1A is a diagrams illustrating an example of an under-display optical fingerprint sensor; FIG. 6 is a flow diagram illustrating an example method for providing an under-display optical fingerprint sensor.
For more details, review granted patent 11922713.
For the record, Apple also has on record a granted patent for an Ultrasonic finger sensor that is used with Apple's iPad Air and a patent for Ultrasonic Wave Technology that accepts touch commands under water. While other smartphone OEM's like Samsung, OPPO and soon Xiaomi use Single-Point Ultrasonic Finger sensors on their smartphones, Apple has yet to implement this feature. Apple continues to support Face ID alone for their iPhones. Whether this feature will be adopted in the future is unknown at this time.
Design Patent: Apple Vision Pro
Apple is making sure that their Vision Pro headset is legally protected as we've covered a series of detailed design patents since October 2023 that could be reviewed here: 01, 02, 03, 04, 05, 06 and 07.Recently , the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted Apple their 8th round of design patent figures for Vision Pro under number D1016811. This is Apple's second U.S. based granted design patent for Vision Pro.
Translated from: patentlyapple
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