In mid-March Patently Apple posted a report titled "BOE and GIS Partner to win orders for Out-Cell Touch Modules for one of Apple's 5G iPhone models." On April 20 we posted a report titled "OLED display supplier BOE may produce a 6.06" iPhone Display this year as well as supply Qualcomm with Fingerprint ID Displays."

Apple has a few patents on under-the-display fingerprint ID with latest surfacing coincidentally on April 20 titled "Apple Invents Under-Display Optical Fingerprint Sensor with Narrow Field-of-View Collimator and TFT/Organic Imager."

Today a recurring rumor has been posted by Chinese publication UDN that claims that Apple will adopt an "ultra-sound wave screen fingerprint recognition function from suppliers GIS (owned by Hon Hai/Foxconn) and Beijing Oriental Electronic better known as BOE which we reported on in March as referred to earlier.  

Due to supply chain issues with the Wuhan Virus, the rumor suggests that should Apple green-light the project for one of their 5G iPhones to adopt Touch ID under the display, they may have to adopt the Qualcomm-GIS solution. It's questionable as to whether that part of the rumor pans outs.

The report specifically notes that "Industry sources pointed out that, because Samsung S20 series flagship under-the-screen fingerprint recognition technology and module, both by Qualcomm and GIS supply, is the only module on the market today with mass production, high reliability, if Apple wants to rush this year's new machine import, there is a very high probability of using Qualcomm and GIS solutions."

In response to Apple's demand, the iPhone's OLED panel supplier, the mainland panel leader Jingoriental [known as BOE] has taken place, announced that jointly with the global mobile phone chip leader Qualcomm to develop supersonic screen fingerprint recognition technology, the fingerprint recognition technology by Qualcomm master, GIS-KY is responsible for the supply of relevant modules, Taiwan touch factory will return to Apple's high-order machine supply chain.

Beijing Oriental and Qualcomm jointly developed the ultrasound under-screen fingerprint recognition technology, which caused the industry to pay great attention. As Beijing Oriental is Apple's third OLED panel supplier, the market speculated that the future is likely to be Beijing Oriental responsible for supplying OLED panels to Apple, and import Qualcomm, GIS off-screen fingerprint recognition solutions, and then shipped 5G iPhone use." For more on this, read the full Chinese report here. You'll need to translate the page to English which many browsers offer today.