On August 13, Google introduced their new Pixel 9 Pro smartphone with advanced Ultrasonic Fingerprint technology that's reportedly more reliable, faster, and more secure. Apple won a patent for this technology a year ago that's used on the iPad Air.

Today the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office officially granted Apple a patent that relates to another form of fingerprint technology known as "acoustic imaging" that could be used in the future for multiple devices including the iPhone and Apple Watch.

Apple's granted patent relates to acoustic imaging systems and, in particular, to acoustic imaging systems incorporated into electronic devices leveraged to capture images of fingerprints of users of those electronic devices.

In particular, embodiments reference methods operating an acoustic imaging system that includes an array of acoustic transducers (which may be thin-film acoustic transducers) that leverage beamforming and/or beamsteering techniques to condition or concentrate acoustic energy output from each of a first set of acoustic transducers of the array of acoustic transducers toward a selected fractional area of an imaging surface defined by the acoustic imaging system.

More specifically, the patent references systems and methods for driving multiple acoustic transducers with differently-phased signals and/or at different times (e.g., with different delay) so that acoustic energy output from two or more acoustic transducers constructively or destructively interfere at a particular location of an imaging surface or at a particular location after having reflected from the imaging surface.

For example, in some embodiments, beamforming may be used to reduce carrier noise at sense-mode transducers; in such examples, delay coefficients that define delays and/or phase relationships between different drive-mode transducers may not be optimized to concentrate acoustic energy at the imaging surface but, rather, may be optimized to reduce carrier amplitude observed by sense-mode transducers that receive acoustic energy having been reflected from the imaging surface at least once.

More generally, beamforming may be leveraged to improve image contrast and/or increase signal to noise ratio(s). In such examples, selected drive-mode transducers can be operated according to implementation-specific delays/phases in order to effect a particular increase or decrease of acoustic energy at a particular location, which may be at an imaging surface or, in other cases, at one or more selected sense-mode transducers.

In another examples, an imaging surface can be logically subdivided into 66,560 fractional segments, arranged in 64 rows of 1024. In this example, an acoustic imaging system can leverage a beamforming operation to target one fractional area at a time, progressively building an image of an object engaging the imaging surface.

Apple's patent FIG. 1A below depicts an example electronic device incorporating a thin-film acoustic imaging system defining an imaging surface above an active display area of the electronic device;  FIG. 1B depicts an example electronic device incorporating a thin-film acoustic imaging system defining an imaging surface along a housing sidewall of the electronic device; FIG. 1C depicts an example electronic device incorporating a thin-film acoustic imaging system defining an imaging surface along another housing sidewall of the electronic device.

Apple's patent FIGS. 1D-1G above depict an example wearable electronic device incorporating a thin-film acoustic imaging system.

To review the full details of this invention, check out patent application 12067196 in Safari, Chrome or Vivaldi browsers. For the MS Edge browser, the link will open in a PDF.