Date: 25/04/2011

ICs and software for designing capacitance touch interface to TI's MCUs

Texas Instruments Incorporated has announced low power consuming capacitive touch interface chips and low-code space consuming software for interfacing capacitance touch to TI's MSP430 16-bit microcontroller.

The royalty-free MSP430 capacitive touch library gives developers the option to add touch sense capabilities to any MSP430 microcontroller. The open source software library supports various capacitive touch sensors, including buttons, sliders, wheels and proximity. Although the software library supports all MSP430 devices, some include new peripherals optimized specifically for touch sense applications. The MSP430 Value Line G2xx2 and G2xx3 devices include capacitive touch IOs, which enable developers to interface directly with capacitive touch pads without external components.

Key features and benefits of the MSP430 Capacitive Touch Portfolio:
MSP430 Value Line G2xx2 and G2xx3 devices with capacitive touch sense IOs offer memory ranges of up to 16KB Flash and 512B RAM and optimized efficiency enabling ultra-low-power touch sensitive buttons down to 1uA
Upcoming MSP430F51x2 devices will include new MSP430 peripheral, Timer_D, a high-performance timer featuring a 4 nanosecond resolution, enabling high-precision touch sensing
The easy-to-use Capacitive Touch BoosterPack for the MSP430 LaunchPad is a low-cost way to jump start development for touch sensitive scroll wheel and proximity sensors

Pricing and availability: The new MSP430G2xx2 ICs are priced from $0.33 for 100K units and the G2xx3 devices are priced from $0.42 100K units; samples are immediately available. The Capacitive Touch BoosterPack (430BOOST-SENSE1) is priced at $4.30 for a limited time. The MSP430F5529 Experimenter Board is $149 and can be ordered now. Sample MSP430F51x2 devices will be available in 3Q11.

For more info visit www.ti.com