This manufacturer has really done it, beating traditional fingerprint recognition in seconds!
Source: Content compiled from the Internet ， Thanks.
In the past two days, the news that Qualcomm and Vivo jointly launched the first ultrasonic invisible fingerprint recognition technology has been all over the circle of friends.
The ultrasonic invisible fingerprint recognition technology jointly launched by Qualcomm and Vivo is the third-generation fingerprint recognition technology, which can realize fingerprint unlocking directly on the screen and can even be performed underwater. This means that users can still achieve accurate fingerprint unlocking even when their hands are wet.
According to the official introduction, this fingerprint recognition technology based on Qualcomm ultrasonic fingerprint sensor can penetrate 0.8mm glass, 1.2mm OLED display, 0.5mm metal and other materials, and can set the fingerprint area inside the screen or on the back cover of the fuselage.
Since iPhone 5s introduced fingerprint recognition technology into mobile phone applications, fingerprint recognition technology has become a standard feature of mobile phones. Fingerprint recognition technology can be found in flagship phones costing thousands of yuan and low-end phones costing hundreds of yuan.
The explosive fingerprint recognition market
What follows is the arrival of the fingerprint recognition chip market dividend that has been booming in recent years!
According to statistics from market research institutions, global shipments of fingerprint recognition chips reached approximately 499 million units in 2015, an increase of 58% compared to 316 million units in 2014.
In the first half of 2016, domestic smartphone shipments reached 240 million units, of which more than 100 million were equipped with fingerprint recognition, with a penetration rate of more than 40%. It is expected that the penetration rate of fingerprint recognition in smartphones will further increase in the future. Under such circumstances, the price of fingerprint chips is falling rapidly, from US$5 at the beginning of 2016 to around US$2 by the end of the year.
It is estimated that by 2018, the global market size of fingerprint recognition chips for smart terminals will reach 1.199 billion pieces, with sales reaching US$3.07 billion, a CAGR of about 36% for sales and 13% for sales. In this context, fingerprint chip manufacturers, fingerprint recognition module manufacturers, and fingerprint recognition solution providers will all benefit from it.
Traditional fingerprint recognition chip manufacturers
So besides Qualcomm, which other manufacturers are making fingerprint recognition chips? After all, Qualcomm only launched fingerprint recognition chips in 2015, so it can be said that it is still a new manufacturer.
Looking at the global fingerprint chip manufacturers, the current foreign fingerprint recognition manufacturers mainly include several international giants such as AuthenTec, FPC, Synaptics, and Taiwanese manufacturers such as Egis, Elan, Duntech, and Motion. Domestic fingerprint recognition chip manufacturers mainly include Goodix, Mindray, Feinger, Xinwei, Xinqihang, Betle, Silead, Chipone, BYD and more than a dozen other companies.
Among them, AuthenTec of the United States is the world's largest and most technologically advanced supplier of press-type fingerprint recognition sensors, but it only provides its products and technologies to Apple.
It is understood that AuthenTec has been the world's largest supplier of inductive fingerprint recognition sensors, and its fingerprint recognition components have been embedded in Windows laptops many years ago. After Apple spent $356 million to acquire AuthenTec in July 2012, AuthenTec stopped selling sensors to third parties.
AuthenTec's patented technology uses a combination of capacitive and radio frequency sensing methods. Users only need to touch the fingerprint recognition area with their fingers. Its products can read the active layer under the surface of the skin (where the human fingerprint is actually located) to achieve extremely accurate and reliable fingerprint imaging.
In 2013, the TouchID chip in Apple iPhone 5s was a product of AuthenTec, which received unanimous praise from the market and also set off a fingerprint recognition craze.
Fingerprint recognition sensors from Synaptics (Validity) of the United States are mainly supplied to Samsung, and domestic companies such as Lenovo, ZTE, Gionee, and Coolpad also use Synaptics' fingerprint recognition sensors.
Validity's fingerprint technology has been accumulated in the field of biometrics for many years. It was previously used in laptops, and now Validity is promoting it to smartphones and tablets. In November 2013, Synaptics, a global leading design and manufacturing company for the development of human-machine interface interactive solutions for mobile computing, communication and entertainment equipment, completed the acquisition of Validity for a total of US$255 million.
Validity has patented technologies including LiveFlex and Chip-On-Flex, which are characterized by making the contact area of fingerprint recognition very small, and the buttons can be made into various shapes and integrated in any position of the mobile phone. In addition, the COF packaging form greatly reduces the cost of fingerprint recognition sensors. After being incorporated into the touch screen solution provider, Validity is also trying to integrate the fingerprint recognition function on the touch screen.
Swedish FingerprintCards (FPC) is a Swedish biometric sensor technology company that mainly develops, produces and sells fingerprint recognition technology. Currently, FPC can provide two types of fingerprint recognition sensors: touch type and swipe type.
FPC's fingerprint recognition is widely used in Android phones, such as Huawei Honor, Mate, ZTE ARON, Meizu MX5, OPPO R7Plus, OnePlus 2, etc. It is currently estimated that FPC's chip shipments exceed 20KK/month, making it the undisputed leader in fingerprint chips.
FPC's technical competitive advantages include unique image quality, low power consumption and complete biometric systems. With these advantages, as well as the ability to achieve extremely low production costs, FPC's sensors can be used in mass products such as smart cards and mobile phones, as well as IT and network security, access control, etc., with a wide range of applications.
These three companies are some of the largest fingerprint chip manufacturers in the world, but why haven't they launched relatively mature under-screen fingerprint recognition technology that can be mass-produced?
Difficulties of under-screen fingerprint recognition
Technology is the biggest problem at the moment!
The current difficulties of under-screen fingerprint recognition are: first, the glass itself is very fragile. If grooves are dug, the strength of the entire glass will be reduced, and the difficulty of glass processing will be increased. This is challenging for glass raw material suppliers such as Corning, AGC, and Schott, and glass processors such as Lens Technology, Bern, and Star Technology. In order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of the signal and reduce the loss of the signal in the plastic packaging material, the chip packaging needs to adopt advanced TSV technology (which can effectively reduce the chip thickness). The depth and flatness tolerance of the blind hole are difficult to control, and the fingerprint chip using TSV needs to be directly bonded to the glass, so there are higher technical requirements for glass processing.
At present, most fingerprint recognition solutions use wire bonding technology to package the chip, which is mature and low-cost. Since the surface needs to fit with the cover material, the front of the chip will be plastic-sealed to bury the metal leads and form a flat surface. The presence of plastic sealing will affect the accuracy of signal recognition and increase the thickness of the chip. However, for the mainstream open-hole fingerprint form, this is not a big problem, because the chip + cover material (or Coating) is in direct contact with the finger, and a good fingerprint recognition experience can still be achieved.
As the under-screen fingerprint recognition solution has become one of the important trends in fingerprint recognition in the near future, there are currently two solutions - opening blind holes on the front or back of the cover glass. The chip is directly built under the cover glass. It is already difficult for the capacitive signal to penetrate the glass. If there is also plastic sealing material, the signal quality will be even more worrying. If plastic sealing is not used, the bonding wires of wire bonding are directly exposed, which will cause the front of the chip to be not flat enough and unable to fit tightly with the cover glass. Therefore, we believe that under the background of the general trend of under-screen fingerprint recognition solutions, TSV packaging will replace wire bonding as an inevitable choice.
However, before TSV packaging technology can be widely used in mobile phone chips, traditional fingerprint recognition solutions will always have insurmountable barriers!
Qualcomm fingerprint recognition: a latecomer
In order to solve the problems that traditional fingerprint recognition methods cannot solve, Qualcomm has taken a different approach by using ultrasonic fingerprint recognition technology and continuously improving it:
First generation - Sense ID 3D fingerprint technology
At the MWC2015 conference, Qualcomm launched the first smartphone 3D fingerprint authentication solution based on ultrasonic technology, called Snapdragon Sense ID 3D fingerprint technology.
Compared to capacitive touch fingerprint technology, Snapdragon Sense ID is based on ultrasound, so it can scan through smartphone cases made of glass, aluminum, stainless steel, sapphire or plastic. This allows OEMs to easily hide the sensor under the case design without having to find a special opening on the phone to install the sensor. Therefore, it also provides great convenience for the appearance design of the phone.
In addition, because it is ultrasonic technology, the accuracy of fingerprint recognition is not affected even if there is water, dust, hand cream or other dirt on the hands.
Not only that, Snapdragon Sense ID also has higher accuracy and better security performance. It can work properly even when the finger is wet or dirty. The biggest advantage of ultrasonic recognition is that it can penetrate the epidermis to collect 3D information of fingerprints, making it almost impossible for criminals to copy fingerprints. Qualcomm is proud of this and said that Apple and Samsung are lagging behind in this field.
However, after the technology was introduced, it was not widely used!
Second Generation
Two years later, at MWC 2017, Qualcomm announced the launch of a new generation of ultrasonic fingerprint solution, Qualcomm fingerprint sensor, which achieves new enhanced features based on the previous generation Sense ID fingerprint technology, including sensors for displays, glass and metal, directional gesture detection, underwater fingerprint matching and device wake-up.
Specifically, the fingerprint sensor for display can scan, enter and match fingerprints through OLED displays up to 1200 microns thick; the fingerprint sensor for glass and metal can achieve scanning solutions through glass panels up to 800 microns thick and aluminum casings up to 650 microns thick, improving on the previous generation's 400-micron glass or metal penetration capability.
At the same time, this technology is not only suitable for Snapdragon platforms, but can also be used as an independent sensor for other non-Snapdragon platforms. It also supports underwater operations and heartbeat/blood detection (live technology).
It is understood that Qualcomm has mainly launched three new generation ultrasonic fingerprint sensors:
For flagship products: OLED screens that can penetrate 1200 microns
For high-end products: Able to penetrate glass cover/metal backplane with a thickness of 800 to 650 microns
For mainstream products: Able to penetrate 800 micron glass cover
Domestic fingerprint chip manufacturers that are not lagging behind
Compared with Qualcomm's technology, although domestic manufacturers started late, their creativity and technology are not behind at all!
Currently, there are more than six fingerprint chip manufacturers with shipments of more than 1kk. Among them, the biggest dark horse, Goodix, has quickly gained market recognition with its technological and cost advantages since entering the fingerprint recognition market in 2013.
In fact, Goodix has won orders for flagship phones from many mobile phone brands including Meizu, VIVO, LeTV and DOOV, and successfully broke the monopoly of international fingerprint chip manufacturers such as AuthenTec, FPC and Synaptics in 2016.
At present, Goodix Technology's main technology is the IFSTM fingerprint recognition solution. This solution directly attaches the fingerprint recognition module under the touch screen glass panel, without digging holes on the front or back of the phone. It is convenient for terminal manufacturers to perfectly retain the original appearance design style, meet the most popular narrow frame design, and play a waterproof and dustproof effect, bringing more beautiful visual enjoyment and more reliable and convenient fingerprint recognition experience to terminal users.
Therefore, it is not difficult to find that the ultrasonic invisible fingerprint recognition chip launched by Qualcomm this time is very similar to the IFSTM fingerprint recognition technology in function.
For example, the fingerprint recognition solution used in the Xiaomi 6 launched this year is the IFSTM fingerprint recognition technology.
Summarize
Although the ultrasonic fingerprint technology launched by Qualcomm has been a hot topic in the WeChat Moments, it is not surprising for many domestic manufacturers. With the support of Goodix Technology's IFSTM fingerprint recognition technology, many domestic mobile phones have achieved similar functions. As for whether it can really achieve the theoretically perfect under-screen fingerprint recognition, it remains to be verified! The same is true for Qualcomm's technology. Although it adopts a completely different idea, the first generation of fingerprint recognition technology did not receive much attention after it came out. Whether it can convince the market to adopt it is the main problem!
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