Apple wants to turn the screen of the iPhone and iPad in a solar cell

States Patent and Trademark Office has issued U.S. Apple patent for technology integration of solar panels in the screens of mobile devices - smartphones, tablets, and portable players. The paper's engineers say that the physical size of the LCD display continues to grow, the amount of their energy consumption, so this development is to solve the problem of the relatively rapid discharge of mobile devices.

A patent application for the technology Apple was filed in September 2008. As planned by the company, the solar panels are added to the screen is not a separate layer, and integrated directly into the design of the display. The solar panel is both a module to collect the energy and optical sensor. Because this component uses electrodes with the same "coating" as traditional solar panel, touch screen gets "more quadrants or pixels" for touch panels. Accordingly, this type of touch screen is sensitive traditional.

Screen works as follows, when the optical sensor detects the presence of objects near the touch screen, for example, the user's fingers, capacitive mode is activated. If the objects in the immediate vicinity of the display not include optical mode, where collection of solar energy.

 

In addition, there's a supposed block "traffic control", enforced in hardware or software package. This unit distributes the collected energy and makes the choice on what's used for solar energy, it are often sent either on to the operation of the device, or fed to the battery for charging.

At the physical level, capacitive and optical panel can be physically separated into different modules, but at the level of function they combine multiplex block, so that they are managed as a whole.