A new touch sensor IC family from Omron is the key to designing flexible, responsive and reliable capacitive touch controls in the new generation of consumer brown and white goods and AV equipment, as well as vending machines, lift controls and security access.
Designed to integrate easily and quickly with any capacitive touch interface, the new Omron B6TS “application ready” sensing chip is highly tolerant of its working environment with features such as self-teaching, auto threshold and intelligent filtering to simplify system design and improve performance. B6TS compensates continuously for long term drift, to help ensure a long service life, and is designed to be tolerant of EMC interference.
In consumer electrical goods, the controls are normally designed to match the cosmetic appearance of the unit, and the B6TS offers customers a great deal of freedom to build their own circuits around the sensor chip using their own defined electrode configuration. Omron offers an Evaluation Kit called the T-SIS (Touch sensor Smart Installation System) or “B6TWorkbench”, allowing designers to experiment with user-definable settings to achieve desired sensing performance and accommodate anticipated environmental changes in the custom specific touch panel (Man-Machine-Interface MMI).
To minimise the cost of the finished system, cost-effective commercial single-sided PCB materials such as FR-2 or CEM-1 can be applied. B6TS is suitable for use with almost all non-conducting materials such as plastic, rubber, glass, marble and wood. It can also be used with ITO (Indium-Tin-Oxide) and other clear materials to create back light touch keys for graphics and special lighting effects.
Capacitive sensing is growing in popularity as an easy to implement, flexible and reliable control interface for a wide range of applications. Omron is focused on increasing its research and development efforts in this segment and will be introducing further additions to the product range in the near future.