U.S. Patent 8040326 was awarded to Apple Inc. on 2011-10-18 and describes a “Integrated in-plane switching display and touch sensor.” This patent has been cited 278 times by other U.S. patents which places it in the top 500 cited patents since 2010 according to our law firm research, and makes it of the most innovative computer technology patents in the field of electrical engineering. The abstract states:

This relates to adding multi-touch functionality to a display without the need of a separate multi-touch panel or layer overlaying the display. Instead, embodiments of the invention can advantageously utilize existing display circuitry to provide multi-touch functionality while adding relatively little circuitry that is specific to the multi-touch functionality. Thus, by sharing circuitry for the display and the multi-touch functionalities, embodiments of the invention can be implemented at a lower cost than the alternative of superimposing additional multi-touch related layers onto an existing display panel. Furthermore, since the display and multi-touch functionality can be implemented on the same circuit, they can be synchronized so that noise resulting from the display functionality does not detrimentally affect the multi-touch functionality and vice versa. Link: U.S. Patent 8040326

This patent was originally filed on 2007-06-13 which gives it a processing time of 1588 days, compared to an average processing time of 1638 in the field. Apple Inc. has 15027 total patents. The first named inventor is Steven Hotelling of Los Gatos, CA. The assistant examiner was Matthew Yeung.

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