So here’s the thing. All of us are waiting for those beautiful bezel-less beauties like hot cakes to come out of the oven. But the real question is, who is working on the dough ?. Synaptics it seems. Synaptic Inc., a company that holds its worth in creating fingerprint sensor and touchpads, has unveiled the next-gen Synaptics Clear ID, a fingerprint sensor that sits just under the surface.
In-glass fingerprint sensor,
It is what it sounds like.
A sensor that senses your fingerprint mounds beneath the glass and via optical methods identifies that its your finger.
Now in order to understand why this movement in smartphone technology is important we need to look into little bit of the smartphone history.
Don’t worry. Its not that boring kind of a history.
Till now the fingerprint sensor that we have encountered is the physical one right, the touch ID as its called.
The one that is very conveniently placed either in the back, front or in the sides of smartphones.
- On the back : Redmi Note 7
- On the front : Moto-Z2
- On the sides : Sony Xperia Z5.
Apple in its infinite wisdom removed the qualm of touch ID all together via Face ID in iPhone X.
Bold and innovative move as some say.
Synaptics, it seems has a whole new dimension to offer in the pot.
It says both rear fingerprint sensor and facial recognition technology are not ideal.
They say with both these technologies you need to pick up your phone in order to unlock it, which is true.
They want to reduce our efforts of “picking up the phone“.
That’s quite noble of them you know.
And today I was thinking of waking up early to go for a run. But what to do technology doesn’t want me to.
With serious hard work on the tech they came up with what is called Clear-ID that features a sensor hiding beneath your smartphone glass capable of unlocking and approving transactions just by mere touch on the surface.
Technical Details and Implementation,
The sensor that is deployed to achieve the feature is referred to as FS9500.
Its a CMOS optical sensor (meaning it senses the information received in form of reflective 
light input) and the device that has had the privilege of incorporating it for the first time is called the ‘VIVO X20 PLUS UD’.
So this is how the fingerprint sensor works.
You pick up the phone and the phone shows you where to keep the finger for unlocking.
As soon as you place the finger at the desired place you see a pulse of light, in quite a futuristic fashion light up your finger and the sensor beneath the screen uses this data from the reflection to identify you and thus the phone unlocks itself.
It all happens quite fast actually.
How fast exactly is hard to say but as per some users it takes anywhere around 0.7 to 1.5 seconds.
When compared with touch ID and Face ID, its reported to be faster than the Face-ID but slower than the Touch-ID.
Also the fingerprint can be made to access your fingerprint from anywhere on the screen. We are talking lower one-third of the screen, half the screen or the whole damn screen itself.
Pretty cool han !!.
Back to the future,
So the real question I guess is what to make of it.
Well, one thing is sure as of now with the first iteration of the sensor we can’t expect the big boys (Apple, LG, Samsung) to adapt to it right away.
The only reason as far as I can see is the speed.
Its fast but isn’t fast enough for these big players to burden their design team with immediate release.
But the design guys better ready themselves because this newer introduction in fingerprint sensor tech (after some newer and faster iterations obviously) is definitely going to find its way into mainstream phones soon.
The driving force in the background ofcourse will be the bezel-less race.
What do you think of the tech and where do you think will this newer addition in fingerprint senor technology lead the smartphones to ?
Will love your inputs in the comment section.
See you in the next one.
Namaskaram 🙂 _/\_
