Touch sensor replaces buttons and sliders

The CY8C201X0 and CY8C201X2 CapSense Express devices offer up to ten capacitive and/or general purpose I/Os (GPIOs).

Cypress Semiconductor has released the CapSense Express capacitive touch sensing solution for button and slider replacement.

The CapSense Express solution enables designers to implement up to 10 buttons and/or sliders in as little as five minute, with no coding.

The PSoC Express visual embedded system design tool and CapSense Express configuration tool allow designers to monitor and tune the performance of the buttons and sliders in real time using a graphical user interface.

Competing solutions require designers to program and test each adjustment, adding design time and cost.

"Mechanical buttons and sliders are prone to wear and tear from prolonged usage and exposure to heat, moisture and other elements".

"In addition, they do not provide the clean, elegant styling preferred by today's consumer", said Robert Dunnigan, Vice President of Cypress' Nonvolatile and Mixed-Signal Business Unit.

"The CapSense Express solution offers our customers an easy to use, cost-competitive solution to button replacement that enables innovative new products with the fast time to market needed to beat the competition".

The CY8C201X0 and CY8C201X2 CapSense Express devices offer up to ten capacitive and/or general purpose I/Os (GPIOs), allowing design flexibility to implement combinations of buttons, sliders and general purpose functions like LED control and interrupt outputs.

For battery-powered applications, the devices offer power consumption of 1mA active current and 2.6uA in sleep mode.

The new devices offer an operating voltage of 2.4 to 5.25V and an industrial temperature range of -40 to +85C.

In addition, 2Kbyte of Flash memory and an I2C communication interface are provided so designers can choose whether to store tuning values in Flash or load them over I2C at power-up.

The CY8C201X0 and CY8C201X2 CapSense Express devices are packaged in 8- and 16-pin SOIC and 16-pin QFN packages.

Cypress is offering three evaluation kits for designers using the CapSense Express solution.

The CY3218-CAPEXP1 kit features three CapSense buttons, three backlighting LEDs, three LEDs for status and 1 mechanical button.

The CY3218-CAPEXP2 kit offers a five-segment slider with four status LEDs and one mechanical button.

The CY3218-CAPEXP3 features two CapSense buttons with two status LEDs using the smallest package, the eight-pin SOIC.

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