Broadband Piezoelectric Transducers for Under-Display Ultrasonic Fingerprint Sensing Applications

Abstract

Smartphones today have attracted a continuous trend of pursuing narrow-bezel and full-screen displays. To allow for a more user-friendly front side fingerprint recognition in full-screen displays, it is crucial to develop an under-display type of fingerprint sensor. Among fingerprint sensing techniques, ultrasonic fingerprint sensing has been proved to be able to provide more distinctive features and give a high resistance to spoof attacks. However, until now no study about under-display ultrasonic fingerprint sensing has been reported. In this article, for the first time, multilayer under-display ultrasonic fingerprint sensor structure using various active materials/structures were theoretically designed and compared. Based on the theoretical analysis results, a lead zirconate titanate (PZT)-5A-based multilayer under-display ultrasonic fingerprint sensor with a resonant frequency of 20 MHz, and a −6-dB fractional bandwidth of more than 70% was fabricated to meet the requirements of resolution and sensitivity for the under-display ultrasonic fingerprint imaging applications. The prototyped sensor was characterized, and the fingerprint recognition capability was tested using a custom-made fingerprint-mimicking phantom. The phantom images were acquired based on the pulse-echo imaging method. With the 1 μJ impulse driving signal, the sensor was manipulated to image a 2.0 mm × 1.0 mm section of fingerprint-mimicking phantom by mechanical scanning, obtaining an electronic image with 500 × 500 DPI. The fingerprint-mimicking phantom imaging results suggest that the 20 MHz broadband PZT-based multilayer structure holds great potential for under-display ultrasonic fingerprint sensor applications.