Cypress Enables High-Performance Capacitive Touchscreens to Replace Resistive With New TrueTouch™ Solution for Single-Layer Touchscreen Sensors

The new feature available for Cypress’s CY8CTST241 (single-touch with one-finger gestures) and CY8CTST242 (adds limited two-finger gestures such as “pinch” and “zoom”) delivers high performance touchscreen accuracy and responsiveness with a true single-layer sensor panel, drastically reducing the cost of the most expensive component of the touchscreen.

Increasingly, capacitive touchscreens are viewed as a differentiator by buyers of new mobile devices. Capacitive advantages over resistive touchscreens include a more intuitive user experience, better transmissivity, lower power, increased reliability and better durability. Many lower-priced “feature phones” do not offer capacitive touchscreens today because of the cost. The new TrueTouch single-layer sensor opens up new “feature phones” and lower-cost smartphones to capacitive touchscreens, especially in major markets such as China and India.

Traditional capacitive touchscreens use a two-layer sensor to deliver the accuracy and linearity required for today’s user experience. Cypress has developed proprietary algorithms that interface with a true single-layer sensor with no bridges to deliver two-layer performance for an unparalleled combination of user experience and cost sensitivity. The removal of this second sensor layer can save mobile device manufacturers 30 percent or more on sensor costs, and is available today for glass and film. Even with only one sensor layer, the TrueTouch solution delivers accuracy better than 1.25 mm, excellent signal-to-noise ratios, fast response times (80Hz), and best-in-class active power of 3.6mW.

“This is a significant advancement in that it opens up a very large part of the market to capacitive touchscreens,” said Dhwani Vyas, vice president of the User Interface Business Unit at Cypress. “All manufacturers realize the attractiveness of touchscreens, and Cypress is delivering the performance, durability and attractiveness of capacitive touchscreens at a significantly lower price. In fact, leading manufacturers are already beginning high-volume production with this solution.”