A fast-sensing readout circuit in 240 Hz enabled by code division multiple access (CDMA) implemented for an ultra-thin on-cell flexible capacitive touch panel

Abstract

A new fast readout circuit employing the known coding scheme of code division multiple access (CDMA) is successfully designed and applied to a 7-inch ultra-thin, flexible on-cell touch screen panel (TSP). The adopted CDMA is known originally as a coding scheme for data communication, which is applied in this study to address the sensing electrodes of the ultra-thin flexible touch panel. Due to the orthogonality between the driving signals to the touch panel coded by Walsh transform, one type of CDMA, the interference noises between sensing electrodes can be reduced effectively to render accurate touch sensing results. The electromagnetic interference from the flexible display can also be filtered out as baseline component in the output signal. And the frame time of touch reporting can be substantially shortened. Following the sensing electrode is a new readout designed of the switched-capacitor (SC) circuit, to avoid distributing sample signals from parasitic capacitance and also to enlarge the voltage changes due to the capacitance changes caused by touches. A 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is orchestrated after the SC circuit to transform the front-end analog signal to digital codes. The digital part of the designed readout adopts a correction algorithm to eliminate the background signals from the display, and also a moving average algorithm to minimize the higher-frequency noises from the display and other electrodes. Experiments are conducted to validate the expected performance. It is evidenced that the Walsh code driving algorithm improves the quality of the readout output signal to be in 42 dB SNR, the report rate to a fast 240 Hz, and a power consumption of 0.39 mW by each sensing channel.