Learn about the different categories of capacitive touch sensors and their pros and cons.

We’ll bring you up to date with the state of the industry today, as well as give you a glimpse of the future, presenting the future trends and how you can leverage them to better position yourself in the market.

In this session you’ll start of by revisiting some basic definitions, like capacitance and resistance which you’ll use a lot in the sessions to come.

You’ll go in detail about resistivity vs sheet resistance, terms you encounter very often in capacitive sensing.

Understanding the concept of capacitance is key in mastering capacitive sensing, so you will be given an overview of the basics of capacitance, with emphasis on how parameters like distance or area change its value.

Basic examples of capacitors will be examined, like the famous parallel plate and the sphere capacitors.

Finally, you will revisit the basics of electrostatic simulation, covering concepts such as conductors, dielectrics and floating conductors.

You will start of simple, familiarizing yourself with the operational principles of the two types of capacitive touch sensors: self and mutual capacitive touch sensors.

To gain a better understanding, you will be presented with all the major components of a capacitive touch sensor: the sensor itself, the traces and the touch IC (also known as the microcontroller).

Then, it’s time to dive deeper.

You will learn about the most common applications of capacitive touch sensors, like screens, buttons, sliders and wheels.

In capacitive sensing, the go-to conductor material for the past decade has been Indium Tin Oxide (ITO). However, it isn’t the only option out there.

You will learn about the materials available in the market: their electrical, optical and mechanical properties.

But the choice of the material is just the first step towards creating the electrodes. How does the shape or the sheet resistance of the material affect the performance of the final product?

You will be able to answer this question at the end of this session.

The choice of dielectrics plays a pivotal role in the performance of the touch sensor.

You will learn about the options for dielectrics available in the market, as well as the most popular stack-ups.

How does the thickness of the cover glass, or any other layer of the stack-up affect the sensitivity of the sensor?

What impact does the relative permittivity have?

Those will be two of the major takeaways of this session.

Traces remain an elusive topic in capacitive sensing.

Most designers and hardware engineers rely on documentation provided by IC vendors to route them.

In this session, we will teach you how they influence the sensor’s behavior and we will provide you with some general design tips on how to route them properly.

Having access to SENSE, you will also be encouraged to experiment on your own, and find out the best trace routing for your designs!

EMC/EMI is a constant headache for touch sensor designers and analysts. A hardware solution to mitigate this problem is shields.

You will examine different kinds of shields: Grounded or active and hatched or solid.

You will learn how to choose the proper shield for each case and how to examine the effect that placing a shield will have both from an EMC/EMI point of view and from a sensitivity point of view.

Sensitivity is the holy grail of capacitive sensing.

After learning what sensitivity is and how to calculate it, you will tackle the ultimate problem of capacitive sensing:

How can I increase the sensitivity of a capacitive touch sensor?

Obviously, this isn’t a trivial task.

What we’ll teach you is a methodology on how to go about increasing sensitivity and how to achieve the best trade-off between sensitivity and other properties of your design.

One of the constant headaches of those in the touch screen industry, is the fact that there can be virtually countless different gloves that the user can wear when touching the sensor you’ve designed.

Gloves come in myriads of combinations of thickness and materials. Verifying that your design works under all of these combinations can either make it destined for success, or break it.

With touch sensors being used more and more in industrial HMI, there is need for them to not only be sturdy, but also reject false touches from the environment.

After completing this course, you will be ready to design a touch sensor for gloved use or for use in demanding environments.

Support for multiple fingers (also know as multitouch) is something that everybody takes for granted. That is, unless they have worked in the touch industry.

Getting multi-touch right is much trickier than it sounds. In this session, you will learn the most common mistakes that newcomers make and how to avoid them.

Water rejection is one of the most challenging aspects of capacitive sensing.

You will find out the tips and tricks our experts use to tackle this problem.

3D shaped (e.g. curved/flexible designs) are the future of capacitive touch sensing!

These cutting edge technologies require novel technologies and design solutions to get them right. Our experts have experience with this kind of designs, and will give you unique insights on how they work. 

It’s important to be able to extract the equivalent circuit of the touch sensor you have designed, to perform SPICE analyses on it.

You will find out how to extract the equivalent circuit, typical layouts of equivalent circuits, types of SPICE analyses and the kind of results you can get out of them.