Cypress TrueTouch controllers provide industry’s best waterproofing for capacitive touchscreens

SAN JOSE, USA: Cypress Semiconductor Corp. announced that its leading TrueTouch touchscreen controllers now offer the industry’s best waterproofing performance.

As water is conductive (like a finger touching the screen), capacitive touchscreens often suffer from false touches reported from water droplets, a thin film of water, or wet or sweaty fingers. Additionally, some of the leading smartphones today tend to “lock up” after water has been wiped off the screen.

Manufacturers have worked around these problems with water repellant coatings and sensing technologies that can only operate accurately in the presence of small water droplets. Cypress has now enabled the next generation of technology improvements that allow TrueTouch customers to design high-performance touchscreens without expensive hydrophobic film or unintentional lock-ups inherent with other controllers.

Cypress’s TrueTouch devices deliver superior waterproofing due to their unique, patent-pending ability to execute both self-capacitance and mutual-capacitance measurements in the same device — and switch dynamically between the two in application. This capability, enabled by the flexible PSoC architecture, is also at the heart of many of the other unique industry-leading features enabled by TrueTouch, including 1-mm stylus support and hover-sensing capability.

“Waterproofing, stylus support and hover sensing are all examples of a real advantage of TrueTouch — the ability to enable advanced functions that help our customers to differentiate their products,” said Dhwani Vyas, vice president of the User Interface Business Unit at Cypress. “Performance in the presence of water is very important, especially in humid climates with the active lifestyle of users of mobile phone, tablets, e-readers, digital cameras and other consumer applications. TrueTouch delivers a far superior waterproofing solution, which our customers are eager to implement.”

In addition to its unique features, Cypress’s TrueTouch technology provides the industry’s best noise immunity, highest signal to noise ratio (SNR), lowest power consumption and more. In addition, TrueTouch provides highly accurate 1mm stylus tracking accuracy better than 0.7 mm, along with 120Hz refresh rates for full handwriting recognition.