Mark Lee
Cypress Semiconductor

Adopting capacitive sensing as an interface technology in high-volume, high-visibility applications such as portable media players and mobile handsets has created demand for the same technology in more conventional consumer electronics. This demand has led to significant innovation and several competitive technologies are available. The PSoC architecture allows designers to incorporate multiple capacitive sensing design elements into an application. Buttons, sliders, touchpads, and proximity detectors are supported simultaneously with the same device in the same circuit. Use PSoC to scan capacitive sensors and use the activation status to drive LEDs, control a motor, drive a speaker, and so on. A concept called dynamic reconfiguration allows the CapSense application to use more than 100% of the system resources by reconfiguring as needed on-the-fly. With so many potential applications, design rules must function more as guidelines. This document describes some layout and system design guidelines for PSoC CapSense.