Samsung has made no secret of its intentions of ruling the wearable device marketplace. It is one of the few big manufacturers that have already released multiple wearable devices, which include smartwatches and activity trackers. The company is likely to going to have similar devices in the pipeline next year and if Synaptics CEO Rick Bergman is right, its possible that they even have fingerprint sensors.
Synaptics is a human interface solution provider. The only client of its fingerprint technology for now is Samsung, which uses it in the Galaxy S5.
Talking to the press at the Computex conference in Taipei Bergman said that there’s a possibility the market will see fingerprint technology in wearable devices by next year. “Using fingerprint ID sensors for a small curved display is not a big challenge,” he said.
While Bergman didn’t explicitly name Samsung, its hard to believe that the Korean juggernaut wouldn’t want to be the first to implement this technology in wearable devices, particularly when it already has a relationship with Synaptics.
Its first small area-type fingerprint sensors will be unveiled in the second half of 2014. They will be adopted for smartphones and tablets first before making their way to wearables in 2015.
An example of the area-type sensor is Touch ID on Apple iPhone 5s, Samsung uses a swipe-based sensor on the Galaxy S5 as well as the newly unveiled Samsung Z, its first Tizen smartphone.
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