Infineon plans for 3D: collaboration with Qualcomm and video bokeh for 5G smartphones

Infineon, a German-based chip manufacturer, is going to collaborate with Qualcomm in order to develop a new 3D authentication design. The company states in a press release from yesterday that the new 3D sensor design will be based on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 865 mobile platform.

The reference design uses the REAL3 3D time-of-flight (ToF) sensor, which is a camera technology, available on the smartphone market for a few years, that enables the accurate and reliable depth sensing of a given image. The technology was co-developed by Infineon and one of its partners, German semiconductor company pmdtechnologies AG. 3D sensors, such as the mentioned above, can be used to further secure authentication or allow payment by facial recognition, similarly to the Face ID system that’s available on Apple iPhones.

Infineon’s Power Management & Multimarket division president, Andreas Urschitz, said in a press release that the company continues to focus on the 3D sensor market and its collaboration with Qualcomm underlines the potential of their ambitions on the topic.

Additionally, Infineon states that starting March 2020, the REAL3 sensor will allow the bokeh function for video for the first time in some of the 5G capable smartphones. The sensor also provides accurate depth measurement of an image thanks to an infrared light reflected from people or objects. In addition to this, a technology named SBI (Suppression of Background Illumination) is said to provide quality measuring in different lighting conditions.