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New Cypress CapSense® Express™ Controller is World's Easiest-to-Implement Capacitive Touch Sensing Solution

31st August 2010

Cypress Semiconductor

ES Admin

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Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (Nasdaq: CY) the market leader in touch-sensing, today announced a new CapSense® capacitive touch-sensing controller that enables designers to achieve mechanical button replacement (MBR) without having to write firmware or learn to use new software tools. The new CapSense Express™ device leverages Cypress’s revolutionary SmartSense™ auto-tuning algorithm, which eliminates the requirement for system tuning. Cypress’s accompanying design toolbox provides detailed resources to ensure optimal interface performance, and advanced system debug features allow taking designs directly to production for significantly shorter time-to-market. The controller delivers robust touch-sensing with ultra-low power consumption to extend battery life in a wide range of handheld products, and is ideal for consumer, communication, white goods, lighting, industrial and medical applications.

The hardware-configurable CY8CMBR2044 CapSense Express Mechanical Button Replacement controller operates from 1.7 to 5.5V and offers low overall power consumption with supply current in run mode as low as 15 uA per button and industry-best deep sleep current of 100 nA. The devices offer reliable operation in the harshest sensing conditions and Cypress’s patented CSD (CapSense Sigma Delta) sensing method ensures superior immunity to conducted and radiated noise. With SmartSense auto-tuning, the device dynamically optimizes the baseline and detection threshold and adjusts for the optimal capacitance sensing range at power up and during runtime as environmental conditions change.

Our new CapSense Express controller with SmartSense auto-tuning technology is the easiest-to-implement capacitive touch-sensing solution available, said Dirk Franklin, business unit director for Cypress’s CapSense solutions. If you can lay out a PCB, then you can add a capacitive touch interface to your next product. This solution greatly reduces design risk and time to market, simplifying the design-in cycle to a layout task and eliminating the system-tuning step. This device greatly broadens the markets and customers for CapSense, as developers no longer need to be microcontroller (or firmware) experts or have vast tuning experience to easily design out their mechanical buttons.

Eliminating the need to tune the UI subsystem is a significant advantage for large and small manufacturers alike, as it saves engineering time and yield loss that can occur with even slight variations in manufacturing tolerances. This savings is greatly multiplied for customers with a global factory footprint and supply chain. SmartSense auto-tuning can eliminate the need for additional test steps currently required with competing solutions to address the vendor-to-vendor variations in PCBs and overlays.

The CapSense Express device accurately tracks button pushes, even with very closely-spaced sensors. The device also features a built-in failure analysis feature with serial data out for debug, speeding the design-in process. It also integrates a voltage regulator to address power supply noise as well as filters for any spurious noise. The device is available in a small form factor 3 x 3 x 0.6-mm 16-pad QFN package.