真乄科技業的頂尖投資團隊

Apple has been granted yet another patent for a fingerprint reader embedded underneath the display itself, a feature widely expected to debut on iPhone 8.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) this morning awarded the iPhone maker a patent for an “electronic device including finger biometric sensor carried by a touch display and related methods”. The company first applied for this patent on January 27, 2015.

Apple’s proposed system would let users authenticate themselves in apps faster than before, without requiring a dedicated Touch ID prompt. That’s because any interactions with apps would allow the embedded sensor to read the finger touching the display.

From Apple’s patent:

Where a fingerprint sensor is integrated into an electronic device or host device, for example, as noted above, it may be desirable to more quickly perform authentication, particularly while performing another task or an application on the electronic device.

In other words, in some instances it may be undesirable to have a user perform an authentication in a separate authentication step, for example switching between tasks to perform the authentication.

Apple’s in-screen reader may include an interconnect layer that has transparent conductive traces and a finger biometric sensing layer with an array of transparent conductive finger biometric sensing pixels capacitively coupled to at least one transparent conductive layer of the display.

Integrating Touch ID, other sensors and the front camera into the display might permit Apple engineers to remove the top and bottom chin from a future iPhone, potentially paving the way for a fresh iPhone design with a full-screen face.

Apple recently filed for another patent titled “Acoustic Imaging System Architecture,” a method for resolving an image of a fingerprint when a user touches the display.

Source:美國專利局http://pdfpiw.uspto.gov/