An Overview of Mobile Capacitive Touch Technologies Trends

Touch sensing, as a major human/machine interface, is widely used in various commercial products such as smart watches, mobile phones, tablets and TVs. State-of-the-art touch detections are mainly based on mutual capacitive sensing, which requires necessary contact-touch, limiting the mobile user experience. Recently, remote gesture sensing is widely reported in both academy and industry as it can provide additional user-experience for mobile interface. The capacitive remote gesture sensing is mainly based on detecting self-capacitance, achieving high resolution through eliminating the parasitic mutual capacitance. In this work, we overview the different generations of touchscreen technology, comparing the touch and remote gesture sensing technologies difference. In addition, different remote gesture sensing technologies are also compared. The limitations and potentials of different topologies are discussed and a final conclusion about the technology trends is summarized in the end.