The US Patent and Trademark Office officially published a series of four newly Issued Patents for Apple Inc. today. The notables within this group include one relating to Apple’s Macbook Air gesturing touch pad technology which extends to their iPhone, an important design win for the iPhone and two other minor patents relating to the Mac Pro and a windowing system for OS X.

MacBook Air & iPhone Touch Pad Patent

This particular touch pad patent is primarily about a combined location and force imaging touch pad that includes two sets of drive traces, one set of sense traces and a spring membrane. One of the key attributes to this patent is that it covers Apple’s MacBook Air trackpad technology. Apple introduced the MacBook Air in January 2008 with a trackpad that introduced multi-touch gesture support.

The patent states that the operation of computer input devices (e.g., touch pads) for touch detection based on the principle of mutual capacitance is described in US patent application entitled “Multipoint Touchscreen” by Steve Hotelling, Joshua A. Strickon and Brian Q. Huppi.

Force Detection Touchpad for MacBook Air and iPhone

Apple’s patent FIG. 1 below, presents the general concept of a force detector as it may be embodied in touch pad device 100. As illustrated, force detector 100 comprises cosmetic layer 105, sense layer 110 (including conductive paths 115 and electrical connector 120), dielectric spring layer 125 (including spatially offset raised structures 130), drive layer 135 (including conductive paths 140 and electrical connector 145) and base or support 150. (It will be understood by those of ordinary skill in the art that connectors 120 and 145 provide unique connections for each conductive trace on layers 110 and 135 respectively.)

Apple’s patent FIG. 3 noted above, is a block diagram of force imaging system 300 utilizing force detector touch pad 100. The force imaging system 300 comprises force detector 100 coupled to touch pad controller 305 through connectors 120 (for sense signals 310) and 145 (for drive signals 315). Touch pad controller 305, in turn, periodically sends signals to host processor 320 that represent the (spatial) distribution of force applied to detector. Host processor 320 may interpret the force information to perform specified command and control actions. .

While Apple’s patent FIG. 8A is another location and force detection device example, it should be noted that the patent also briefly covers multitouch technology pertaining to the iPhone which the patent simply refers to as a “mobile phone.” Patent Fig 12B covers the iPhone application.
Apple credits Steven P. Hotelling (San Jose, CA) and Brian Q. Huppi (San Francisco, CA) for patent 7,538,760 originally filed in March 2006.

Apple Granted iPhone Design Patent

Apple has been granted a design patent for an “Electronic device” which is generally understood to be the iPhone as the illustrations confirm.

Apple credits the following engineers and their CEO for the iPhone design as follows: Andre; Bartley K. (Menlo Park, CA), Coster; Daniel J. (San Francisco, CA), De Iuliis; Daniele (San Francisco, CA), Howarth; Richard P. (San Francisco, CA), Ive; Jonathan P. (San Francisco, CA), Jobs; Steve (Palo Alto, CA), Kerr; Duncan Robert (San Francisco, CA), Nishibori; Shin (San Francisco, CA), Rohrbach; Matthew Dean (San Francisco, CA), Satzger; Douglas B. (Menlo Park, CA), Seid; Calvin Q. (Palo Alto, CA), Stringer; Christopher J. (Portola Valley, CA), Whang; Eugene Antony (San Francisco, CA) and Zorkendorfer; Rico (San Francisco, CA). Apple’s granted patent D593,087 was originally filed for in July 2007.

Other Granted Patents Issued Today: Apple was granted a patent relating to the Mac Pro in respect to a housing for accommodating one or more riser cards in the Riser card housing patent, and an OS X granted patent was issued for Computer system with graphical user interface including drawer-like windows.

NOTICE: MacNN presents only a brief summary of patents with associated graphic(s) for journalistic news purposes as each such patent application and/or Issued Patent is revealed by the U.S. Patent & Trade Office. Readers are cautioned that the full text of any patent application and/or Issued Patent should be read in its entirety for further details.

Jack Purcher, MacNN Senior Patent Editor