Date: 17/10/2011

PSoC 3 capacitive touch-sensing solution for buttons, sliders, touchpads

Cypress Semiconductor Corp. has introduced the PSoC 3 CapSense Plus capacitive touch-sensing solution for buttons, sliders, touchpads, and proximity sensing. It's the industry's best capacitive-sensing solution that can also perform general system control functions,claims Cypress. The new product combines two premier Cypress product offerings, the PSoC 3 programmable system-on-chip and CapSense capacitive touch control technology.

PSoC 3 CapSense Plus lowers system design cost and eases the design process with Cypress's revolutionary, patent-pending SmartSense auto-tuning algorithm, which eliminates the requirement for system tuning, says Cypress. SmartSense enables automatic tuning of more than 10 parameters to achieve optimal touch sensing performance. The graphical CapSense software module in Cypress's PSoC Creator IDE makes it easy for designers to define combinations of buttons, sliders, touch pads and proximity-sensing capacitive sensors, and offers real-time feedback of parameters such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), finger threshold, noise threshold, and more.

The new PSoC 3 CapSense Plus devices offer up to 62 General Purpose I/O (GPIO) pins-all of which can handle CapSense signals-enabling the industry's largest number of capacitive sensing elements in a single chip. The new solution provides Cypress's noise immunity that ensures robust operation in the presence of noise from a variety of sources.

"Designers recognize Cypress as the leader in capacitive touch solutions and also appreciate the power and flexibility of the PSoC 3 architecture," said Gahan Richardson, vice president of PSoC platform products for Cypress. "We've made it easy for designers to combine these two marquis technologies to simplify the system design process in many applications."

The Cypress PSoC 3 architecture, based on a high-performance 8-bit 8051 processor, has unique programmable analog and digital peripherals that enable capabilities such as motor control, intelligent power supply and battery management, LCD segment display, graphics control, as well as audio/voice processing, communication protocols, and much more. Its integrated 20-bit Delta Sigma ADC delivers better than 18-bit effective number of bits (ENOB) performance.

For more information is available at www.cypress.com

Availability: The PSoC 3 CapSense Plus solution is available today on any of Cypress's PSoC 3 devices. The CY8CKIT-031 kit is also available now from Cypress's web site and from its authorized distributors priced at US$115.