Cypress Semiconductor CapSense ™︎ Touch-Sensing Solutions

Cypress Semiconductor CapSense Touch-Sensing Solutions

The world leader in touch sensing solutions is driving the Touch Revolution across many industries – wireless, consumer, computation, white goods, and automotive. Cypress’s CapSense Capacitive Touch Sensing portfolio, powered by PSoC Mixed-Signal Array technology, represents the most diverse, flexible, and easy-to-use touch sensing solutions that enable designers to speed their time to market.

Bring elegant, reliable, and easy-to-use CapSense touch-sensing functionality to your next design with the broadest touch sensing portfolio.

Capsense technology from Cypress eliminates ugly and worn-down mechanical buttons, sliders, and membrane technologies.

Having already replaced more than 2.5 billion buttons, Cypress CapSense touchsensing solutions are changing the face of industrial design. They enable designers to create the stylish products customers demand. What’s more, CapSense solutions leverage Cypress’s robust PSoC programmable system-on-chip architecture, which accelerates time-to-market, integrates a variety of critical system functions, and reduces BOM costs. PSoC technology also dramatically simplifies embedded system development with a drag-and-drop design environment that provides the unparalleled flexibility to make changes late in the design cycle.

CapSense Technology Explained

CapSense solutions detect the presence or absence of a conductive object (such as a finger) by measuring changes in capacitance. This technology lends itself equally well to buttons, sliders, switches, touchpads, touchscreens, and proximity sensors, taking industrial design possibilities to a much higher level. And, thanks to built-in PSoC programmable technology, CapSense Solutions are much more than meet the eye. For example, its proximity-sensing feature can “wake” an idle system when it detects the presence of an approaching object, such as a hand—even through protective overlay materials several millimeters thick. This power-saving feature is often used to illuminate LED buttons or backlit screens that are otherwise powered off when not in use. CapSense Technology can also be used as part of a measurement and reporting solution for monitoring liquid levels in industrial applications.

Cypress Software Simplifies Touch -Sensing Innovation

PSoC Express visual embedded system design software (shown at right) enables true drag-and-drop development. With the CapSense Express configuration tool, designers with no coding experience can create CapSense-based designs in five easy steps: Configure I/Os, Assign Pins, Define Logic, Apply to Board, and Monitor/Tune. PSoC Designer combines drag-and-drop conveniences with the ability to add sophisticated C or Assembly language code on the fly. The software also has hundreds of time-saving pre-characterized and configured analog and digital user modules to shorten touch-sensing development time.

Features & benefits:

Three levels of Integration and convenience;

• CapSense: Programmable Touch Sensing
  o Enables customisation without complexity
  o I2C and SPI interfaces
  o Real time monitoring/tuning for any surface or environment
• CapSense Plus: CapSense with non-Touch Sensing Functionality (Motor Control, Power Management, Gyro Sensing, etc.)
  o Complete PSoC flexibility( up to 4 digital and 6 analog blocks)
  o I2C, SPI,UART, and USB interfaces
  o Real time monitoring/tuning for any surface or environment
• CapSense Express: Quickest & Easiest to Use Touch Sensing – NEW
  o Touch Sensing design via I2C registers
  o Real time monitoring/tuning for any surface environment

Application information:

The CapSense product line is fully supported with a broad range of Capsense kits;

• PSoC FirstTouch Ulimate Starter Kit (CY3270)
• CapSense Express Evaluation Kits (CY3218 – CAPEXP1 & 2)
• CapSense Evaluation Kits CY3203A/CY3213A
• USB Evaluation Kit CY3214
• Universal CapSense Development kit  CY3280-BK1CY3280-BK1

Product information table: