Vivo to unveil its first smartphone with in-display fingerprint reader, on January 10th

This time it's official guys, as the Chinese company recently posted a teaser image in their social media, paving the way for the unveiling of their own version of a smartphone with an in-display fingerprint reader!

News comes directly from Vivo, the manufacturer that has collaborated with Synaptics - a pioneer in this area- with the two companies working together to launch a smartphone that will be equipped with the Clear ID FS9500 chip, the hardware that will be responsible for the whole fingerprint scanning procedure. The chip was unveiled by Synaptics a couple of weeks ago and it is designed to work with phones boasting displays with 18:9 and 20:9 orientations, retaining - at the same time- minimal dimensions of just 0,69mm.

The new chipset consists of a small CMOS sensor placed directly below an AMOLED display, ready to scan fingerprints when they are illuminated, by "reading" the reflections of each finger scan. In order to create this reflection, part of the screen has to light up, and then the finger reader will capture the reflection between the AMOLED pixels.[irp]

According to Synaptics, the whole process consumes minimal energy (not more than 80mA of power) and it works in conjunction with all the relevant sensors of each smartphone, in order to know when to activate the fingerprint reader and light up the appropriate part of the display. If you're worried about speed, then you will be happy to know that - according to Synaptics- the whole process takes just 0.7 seconds. For comparison, the typical fingerprint reader nowadays needs just 0,2 seconds to "read" our fingerprint and the typical face recognition procedure needs 1.4 seconds per average to complete.