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Synaptics capacitive touchscreens: Just the right touch for appliances
Touch user interfaces have made significant advances in the consumer electronics market particularly for mobile phones and notebook computers, opening the door for adoption in other applications including white goods, computer peripherals, medical equipment, and instrumentation.
Until recently, these consumer applications have relied on resistive-based touch. Today, increasing demand for touchscreens, coupled with new advanced features, especially in mobile and smart phones, is driving the shift from resistive technology that requires the force of a finger or a stylus to activate a button on the screen to capacitive-based touch that can deliver a much richer user interface (UI) with multi-finger gesturing that allows users to accomplish more complex tasks, said Al Woo, senior product manager for emerging markets at Synaptics (Santa Clara, Calif.).
Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) need to develop solutions that provide a simple and easy-to-use interface for the user. Woo says now that consumers are getting accustomed to touchscreens in mobile phone applications, it should shorten the learning curve in other applications including appliances.
Durability and cleanability are big issues in the appliance market, particularly since they are often found in messy or dirty environments. In the past, buttons used in appliances were difficult to clean, which led to the use of membrane switches. Although easy to clean, membranes aren’t very durable.
This led to the use of resistive touchscreens, which deliver touchscreen usability, but similar to membrane switches, they aren’t very durable and are prone to damage.
Enter capacitive touchscreens, which combine the best of both worlds and offer significant advantages for white goods in three primary areas — durability, user experience and design.
Synaptics’ capacitive touch solutions deliver greater durability, spill and scratch resistance and a sleek industrial design that consumers want, said Woo. For OEMs, the solution offers designers easy system integration, faster time to market and product differentiation through its complete sensor module offering, he added.
In addition, capacitive touchscreens have no moving parts to damage and deliver unlimited touches compared to resistive and membrane technologies that typically offer less than 5 million touches or taps.
These touchscreens also are typically mounted under plastic or glass, making it a much more durable solution that eliminates the potential for damage. It also makes it resistant to shock/vibration and vandalism.
Users also get a much richer experience with unlimited touch — sliding, pinching, rotating — together with advanced multi-finger and gesturing support, unlike resistive touch that generally provides only one-finger tapping.
With capacitive, designers get virtually an unlimited number of gesturing — two-finger advanced scroll, two-finger reverse, two-finger rotate, two-finger pinch/zoom, three-finger flick, 3-finger press, pivot rotate, twist rotate and linear scrolling.
Gestures can provide appliance makers with an unlimited list of innovative ways to enhance a user’s experience that is only limited by the designer’s imagination.
As an example, a microwave oven manufacturer can now add a cookbook function to the oven that enables the user to scroll through recipes on the screen, pinch and zoom on the recipe photo to take a closer look, and tap a button to preset the microwave to the correct time and temperature for the meal, said Woo.
Washing machine makers can also replace pushbuttons and mechanical turning knobs with a couple of “virtual” buttons and a scroll strip or area on the screen that enables the user to scroll through any number of different options including cycle, temperature or type of clothes with a few taps or flicks, he added.
Capacitive also offers proximity detection, or wake-up on proximity, which is not possible with either resistive or mechanical solutions. It allows users to interact with the appliances without touching them, just by sensing the presence of a user’s hand. This brings a new set of interaction to smart devices, while offering a higher level of interactivity to users, such as offering the capability to “wake up” the touchscreen on a refrigerator or a microwave oven with a wave of the hand in a dark kitchen, said Woo.
Other key features include high transmission rates, low reflectance, low haze, and high color purity.
Woo also said the technology offers the best use of control panel real estate especially as controls become more complex. The sensor’s sensitivity can be tuned for operation under a product’s casing or plastic facesheet of up to 1.2-mm thick.
According to Woo, Synaptics is the only total solution provider to offer gestures in firmware for easy customer integration, ranging from single-touch (tap, double-tap, press, and flick) to dual-touch gestures (pinch, pivot-rotate and twist-rotate) directly from the touch module.
Customers don’t need additional recognition software on the host processor for implementation, which also lowers the host processor’s resource requirements, he said.
ClearPad touchscreens for appliances
Synaptics’ ClearPad solution provides designers with two product options. Aimed at mid-range touchscreen applications up to 7 inches, the ClearPad 1000 capacitive touchscreen solution offers several gesture capabilities including single-tap, double-tap, tap-and-hold, 1-finger press and flick.
The ClearPad 3000, aimed at high-end applications, offers several additional gestures including 2-finger press, pinch, free rotate and multi-finger gestures for touchscreens up to 10 inches.
The ClearPad 1000 offers an average positional accuracy of +/- 2.0 mm and linearity of less than 3 percent, while the 3000 series provides +/-0.8 mm accuracy with linearity of less than 2 percent. Both ClearPad series offer an 80 Hz frame rate and I2C and SPI interfaces.
A ClearPad solution is easy to use because it has a similar “feel” to pressing a physical button, and users can perform left- or right-button clicks without moving their fingers from the touch surface, said Woo.
The solution also features low power consumption, providing doze, sleep, and deep sleep modes, to maximize battery life and use less energy. The sensors can turn on as quickly as 100 milliseconds from device power-on.
The ClearPad is available in a variety of materials and finishes including glass, plastic and Mylar. The surface can be customized for product differentiation, including texturing or embossing for enhanced usability. In addition, the thin form-factor allows for greater design flexibility. The size and shape of the ClearPad sensor and electronics module can be customized to meet specific device requirements.
These sensors can illuminate LEDs for discoverable buttons, wake devices from power-saving mode immediately, or activate other functionality. As a result, designers can benefit by offering many compelling design options for further customization and differentiation in the marketplace, said Woo.
Synaptics TouchButtons
Synaptics made its debut in the home appliance market earlier this year with the launch of the Samsung Hauzen ZERO air conditioner (AC). The AC unit incorporates Synaptics TouchButtons solution that includes the company’s proprietary mixed-signal ASICs and its full suite of easy-to-use, GUI-based design and development tools.
The configurable OneTouch development suite and tools provide all the necessary tools to take the designer through the entire new product development process from concept to mass production. The OneTouch Studio software allows designers to configure and tune firmware right on the chip.
In addition to software tools and documentation (datasheets, application notes and design guidelines), the development suite comes packaged with hardware including example sensors, sensor carrier and control bridge (USB to I2C interface).
Together with complete documentation and tech support, Samsung was able to configure the illuminated capacitive touch buttons on the front panel to manage power, temperature, fan speed, and other controls.
All of the TouchButton solutions support industry-standard interfaces to communicate with host processors for optimal interoperability and easy integration. They are also available in a variety of sizes and shapes to meet a customer’s space requirements.
The solution is scalable for multiple designs and with pre-set design rules and guidelines, it minimizes printed-circuit-board (PCB) redesigns, said Woo.
Available in several options including 0D buttons, 1D linear strips with multi-finger detection and gestures, proximity sensing, current-controlled LED drive support with advanced effects and configurable GPIOs, designers can develop any number of combo solutions such as LED effects + strip capabilities, LED effects + strip capabilities + gestures + tap zones or LED effects + strip capabilities + proximity sensing.
LED effects include finger tracking, brightness settings, configurable fade up/down periods, configurable power-up/down animation, blink, pulse, and heartbeat animation. Strip capabilities include full 2048 finger position resolution, finger position and pressure detection, motion acceleration control, and crossing strips.
Gesture and multi-tap detection capabilities feature double taps, tap and hold gestures, and multiple finger detection.
Supplier selection is key
But that’s not the complete story. Supplier selection is as important as technology type.
The big issue for engineers who haven’t been working with capacitive touchscreens is that the supply chain is quite different than resistive or mechanical button technologies, said Woo.
Choosing a touch-screen controller is a very small part of the task, Woo said. “There are a lot of details involved in manufacturing and testing processes as well as designing UI software that have to be considered, and if a designer is not familiar with capacitive technology, it will be to his or her advantage to leverage a supplier’s design expertise to significantly reduce engineering time and to prevent mistakes that could be expensive to fix later in the design cycle.”
Synaptics provides a complete sensor module that is fully calibrated and tested to meet a customer’s requirements, aimed at minimizing time to market and total cost of ownership, particularly in an industry that may not be as familiar with capacitive technology as some other sectors.
In many cases, other vendors only provide chip offerings, said Woo.
The company also offers tech support and has local design centers with development experts in all major manufacturing regions including Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea and the United States.
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