Apple patent involves beefed-up touch pad features
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
May 15, 2008 at 10:49am
Touch pads on upcoming Apple products will get more functionality if the technology mentioned in patent 20080111795 (filed at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office) is used. Invented by Steven Bollinger, the patent relates to sensor array configurations that allow for the accurate determination of an object’s position.
The patent involves sensor array configurations that allow for the accurate determination of an object’s position. The configurations utilize a plurality of varying length sensors that have staggered beginning and ending positions. In other words, Apple wants to offer improved sensor array configurations that allow for accurate determination of finger position in a given area.
Here’s Apple’s background on the invention: “Touch pads are often used in portable consumer electronic devices, such as laptop computers. With a touch pad, the movement of an input pointer (i.e., cursor) corresponds to the relative movements of the user’s finger (or stylus) as the finger is moved along a surface of the touch pad. Touch pads can also make a selection on the display screen when one or more taps are detected on the surface of the touch pad. In some cases, any portion of the touch pad may be tapped, and in other cases a dedicated portion of the touch pad may be tapped.
“Touch pads generally include one or more sensors for detecting the proximity of the finger thereto. By way of example, the sensors may be based on resistive sensing, surface acoustic wave sensing, pressure sensing (e.g., strain gauge), optical sensing, capacitive sensing and the like. The sensors are generally dispersed about the touch pad with each sensor representing an x, y position. In most cases, the sensors are arranged in a grid of columns and rows. Distinct x and y position signals, which control the x, y movement of a pointer device on the display screen, are thus generated when a finger is moved across the grid of sensors within the touch pad. For brevity sake, the remaining discussion will be held to the discussion of capacitive sensing technologies. It should be noted, however, that the other technologies have similar features.
“The smaller and more numerous the sensors are in a given area, the more accurately the position of an object, such as a finger, can be determined.
“However, as the sensors become smaller, the signal produced by positioning an object over a sensor also becomes smaller relative to the amount of noise generated by the sensor and the sensor system. This makes the sensors less accurate and places an effective limit on the number of sensors that can be used in the sensor array covering an area.”
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Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
