BOE to supply OLED screens with ultrasonic fingerprint scanners

Screen maker BOE will supply OLED screens for smartphones with Qualcomm’s 3D Sonic ultrasonic fingerprint scanner. Until now, that scanner was only available in Samsung models with screens from that manufacturer.

The first smartphones with BOE screens and Qualcomm scanners should appear before the end of the year, Qualcomm reports. BOE has been supplying screens behind which manufacturers can place optical fingerprint scanners for some time. These are included in Huawei smartphones with BOE screens.

Ultrasonic scanners work with ultrasonic sound, which reflects off the fingertip in order to be able to read the print of the finger. The alternative is optical scanners, small cameras that detect the fingerprint in 2D by making images when a small part of the screen lights up to show the fingertip to the camera.

Samsung uses the ultrasonic scanners in the Galaxy S10, Note 10 and S20, but in many cheaper phones the manufacturer uses optical scanners. It is unknown whether the BOE screens with ultrasonic scanners will be cheaper to produce.

An ultrasonic scanner can create a 3D image and is therefore potentially safer than the optical scanner with a 2D image of a fingertip, but with the S10 a software bug turned out to cause the scanner to accept every finger. That error has now been fixed.

Ultrasonic scanner in Galaxy S10. Source: iFixit