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Getting Touchyfeely with Touchscreen Design
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Predictive Analytics
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Consumer Goods
- Automotive
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
- Quality Assurance
- Field Services
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Remote Collaboration
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
- Training
The Challenge
Cypress Semiconductor faced the challenge of ensuring that their touchscreen technologies perform flawlessly under a variety of conditions and applications. This includes smartphones, laptops, automotive environments, industrial applications, and home appliances. Each application requires a different design, and the touchscreens must track finger or stylus positions with high accuracy. The capacitive touchscreens need to determine the touch object's size, location, duration, and movement direction. The engineers needed to create multiple electrostatic simulations for various device geometries and parameters, referred to as a 'design box'.
About The Customer
Cypress Semiconductor is a leading supplier of smartphone touchscreen technologies and touch-sensing solutions. Their technologies are used in a wide range of products, including smartphones, mp3 devices, laptops, automotive environments, industrial applications, and home appliances. The company is dedicated to ensuring that touchscreen applications perform flawlessly under various conditions, making it possible for users to interact seamlessly with their devices. Cypress Semiconductor employs a team of R&D engineers who utilize advanced simulation tools to optimize touchscreen designs for diverse applications.
The Solution
Cypress Semiconductor utilized COMSOL Multiphysics simulation software to optimize their touchscreen designs. The R&D engineers performed analyses to determine the electrical performance of the ITO pattern, measuring the change in mutual capacitance between electrodes when a stylus or finger is present. The software's ability to run on unlimited multiple cores and use cluster and cloud computing allowed engineers to quickly run many simulations with virtually no limits on the size of the design boxes analyzed. This enabled them to accurately model capacitive touchscreens by capturing changes between active electrodes in great detail. Additionally, Cypress engineers used the Application Builder in COMSOL Multiphysics to create simulation apps based on their models. These apps allowed customer support teams to run simulations for minor parameter changes without needing the direct involvement of R&D engineers. The COMSOL Server license enabled sharing of simulation apps with colleagues worldwide, allowing support engineers to experiment with thousands of different design options without using a seat on the COMSOL Multiphysics license.
Operational Impact
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