Whitepaper: The touch-sensing HMI wearable and IoT devices
Curious to learn more about touch-sensing human-machine interface (HMI) in wearable devices? Download this informative whitepaper from Infineon and explore expert insight and analysis on the technical challenges and solutions for designing with touch HMI.
To remain competitive in the wearables market, manufacturers are continuously innovating to improve two key features that matter to consumers – battery life and form factor. This is of particular importance when design decisions about the touch HMI are vital, and each generation of a wearable product is expected to bring significant improvements to the touch system’s functionality.
In this whitepaper, you can also learn how to improve your overall design with Infineon’s new touch-sensing controller, PSoC™ 4000T, for wearable and IoT devices, which is based on the company’s CAPSENSE™ capacitive sensing technology. This innovative development reduces average power consumption by ten times and allows for smaller touch sensors, denser placement of components, and has a ten times higher signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover, the new multi-sense capability enables a single sensor to perform multiple sensing functions.
PSoC™ 4000T Microcontrollers with capacitive sensing for ultra-low power applications
PSoC™ 4000T MCUs offer industry-leading capacitive sensing with ultra-low power, best-in-class signal-to-noise ratio, reliability and robustness, liquid tolerance, and multi-sense capabilities. The PSoC™ 4000T have an Arm® Cortex®-M0+ CPU and feature Infineon’s 5th Generation high-performance CAPSENSE™ capacitive sensing subsystem.
PSoC™ 4000T series enables a variety of applications including wearable, hearable, and smart connected IoT products that need low power operation and improved performance for optimal user experience. It also offers an upgrade path for PSoC™ 4000 and PSoC™ 4000S based designs to the fifth-generation CAPSENSE™ with software and package compatibility.
CAPSENSE™ Touch Sensing Technology
The latest 5th generation CAPSENSE™ touch-sensing technology enables new power- and space-saving designs, making it an ideal solution for wearables and other battery powered smart devices mode operation. With new “always -on” sensing technology, it offers extremely lower power consumption in both active and standby modes enabling a game-changing capability that helps to extend battery life.
The 5th generation CAPSENSE™ technology improves signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio performance by 10 times than previous generations with a unique ratio-metric sensing methodology - enabling smaller sensors for smaller factor designs, adding support for Glove touch, improved proximity detection and gesture control, intuitive sensing such as liquid level detection, touch sensing over metallic surface, and superior noise immunity and smooth design experience in challenging environmental conditions. CAPSENSE™ maintains touch accuracy in wet conditions allowing for fully water proof touch buttons.
Key Benefits
- 5th Generation CAPSENSE™ with 10x higher SNR performance improvement and 10x lower power consumption over the previous generation
- Provides a migration path for PSoC™ 4000 and PSoC™ 4000S based designs with performance
Features
- 32-bit MCU Subsystem
- 48-MHz Arm® Cortex®-M0+
- 64KB flash and 8KB SRAM
MSC (Multi-Sense Convertor) with 5th Generation CAPSENSE™
- “Always-On” sensing enabled ultra-low power technology
- Reliable operation under harsh conditions, including wet and high moisture
- Supports self-capacitive and mutual-capicitive sensing technologies
- Supports up to 16 sensors
Programmable Digital Blocks
- Two 16-bit timer/counter/pulse-width modulator (TCPWM) blocks
- Two serial communication blocks (SCBs) that are configurable as I2C, SPI, or UART
- I/O Subsystem
- Up to 21 GPIOs, including 16 sensors
Low-power 1.71 V to 5.5 V operation
- Deep sleep mode with 6 µA “Always-On” touch sensing
- Active touch detection and tracking with 200 µA (average)
Fifth-generation CAPSENSE™
- Best-in-class signal-to-noise ratio and liquid tolerance for capacitive sensing
- “Always-On” sensing in Deep Sleep mode with hardware-based wake on touch detection for ultra-low power operation
- Autonomous sensing for low power optimization with active touch detection and tracking
- Advanced proximity sensing with directivity and gesture control
- Infineon-supplied middleware software makes capacitive sensing design easy
ModusToolbox™ software
- Comprehensive collection of multi-platform tools and software libraries
- Includes board support packages (BSPs), peripheral driver library (PDL), and middleware such as CAPSENSE™
- Industry-standard tool compatibility
Scalable system design with ModusToolbox™
Thanks to the ModusToolbox platform, CAPSENSE™ applications are easily portable from one PSoC™ controller to another, providing for scalability of HMI applications across broad families of product designs.
Infineon supplies a rich set of development resources to support the PSoC 4000T.
Development of CAPSENSE™-based systems is backed by the ModusToolbox™ development platform. ModusToolbox software is a modern, extensible development environment supporting a wide range of Infineon microcontroller devices, including the PSoC™ products. Provided as a collection of development tools, libraries, and embedded runtime assets, it provides a flexible and comprehensive development experience. The ModusToolbox package includes desktop programs that enable:
- The creation of new embedded applications
- The management of software components
- Configuration of device peripherals and middleware
- Compiling, programming, and debugging
PSoC™ 4000T CAPSENSE™ Evaluation Kits
PSoC™ 4000T CAPSENSE™ prototyping kit (CY8CPROTO-040T)
The CY8CPROTO-040T is an easy-to-use traditional prototyping kit for quick proof of concept, development, and evaluation of the PSoC™ 4000T device.
CY8CPROTO-040T PSoC™ 4000T CAPSENSE™ Evaluation Kit
PSoC™ 4000T CAPSENSE™ evaluation kit (CY8CKIT-040T)
The CY8CKIT-040T is a fully immersible, liquid tolerant, PSoC(TM) 4000T evaluation kit featuring 5th generation CAPSENSE™ for demonstration of touch, proximity, and trackpad applications using the PSoC™ 4000T MCU.
CY8CKIT-040T PSoC™ 4000T CAPSENSE™ Evaluation Kit
Featured Content
PSoC™ 4000T Data Sheet - DOWNLOAD NOW
PSoC™ 4000T Product Brief - DOWNLOAD NOW
AN64846 - Getting Started with CAPSENSE™ Application Note - DOWNLOAD NOW
AN234231 - Achieving lowest-power capacitive sensing with PSoC™ 4000T - DOWNLOAD NOW
Infineon‘s PSoC™ 4 Developer Community - VISIT NOW