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A new microcontroller featuring multi-sense capabilities claims to enable new human-machine interface (HMI) and sensing solutions, ranging from sleek metallic product designs with touch-on metal buttons to waterproof touch buttons. Infineon’s PSOC 4 is an Arm Cortex-M0+-based MCU that offers capacitive, inductive, and liquid sensing in a single device.
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Figure 1 PSOC 4 integrates capacitive, inductive, and liquid sensing to accommodate a variety of HMI uses cases. Source: Infineon
This new MCU combines the company’s fifth-generation capacitive sensing technology, CAPSENSE, with inductive and liquid sensing to optimize performance, enable new use cases, and realize cost savings. For a start, the fifth-generation CAPSENSE featuring always-on capability enables sensing at 10x lower power consumption and offers a 10x higher signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than previous devices.
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Figure 2 Capacitive sensing (left) and inductive sensing (right) complement each other to enable new HMI and sensing use cases. Source: Infineon
Inductive sensing is based on a proprietary methodology that is less sensitive to noise; it complements capacitive sensing to enable new HMI use cases like touch-over-metal, force touch surfaces, and proximity sensing. This allows developers to create modern, metal-based and waterproof designs with sleek form factors such as metal touch buttons on refrigerators or robust HMI for underwater devices such as cameras and wearables.
Then there is non-invasive and non-contact liquid sensing, which employs an AI/ML algorithm to facilitate more cost-effective and accurate sensing than mechanical sensors and typical capacitive solutions. Liquid sensing is resistant to environmental factors like temperature and humidity and can detect liquid levels with up to 10-bit resolution in various container shapes.
As a result, it offers capabilities—such as foam and residue rejection and reliably working with varying air gaps between sensor and container—that other liquid sensors don’t support. So, liquid sensing on PSOC 4 can efficiently manage liquids in robot vacuum cleaners, washing machines, coffee machines, and humidifiers.
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Figure 3 PSOC 4 multi-sense eliminates the need for a sensor in a liquid and is insensitive to process variations like gaps between sensor and container. Source: Infineon
Finally, CAPSENSE hover touch sensors enable applications that benefit CAPSENSE from having an air gap between the sensor and the touch surface. It leverages highly sensitive capacitive sensing capability to detect touch interactions from a significant distance. That eliminates the need for the gap to be bridged using a conductive material, typically a spring or conductive foam.
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Figure 4 Hover touch sensing comes into play when a direct touch of a button is not required. Source: Infineon
PSOC 4000T with fifth-generation CAPSENSE and multi-sense capability is available now. Another MCU in PSOC 4 family, PSOC 4100T Plus, offering higher memory and more I/Os, will be available in the second quarter of 2025.
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