F800 allows integration of touch-sense interfaces

The F800 range allows developers to add sophisticated touch-sense interfaces to a range of consumer and industrial electronics products, such as set-top boxes, residential light controls, thermostat controls, home-security panels, commercial point-of-sale (POS) interfaces, portable electronic devices and small appliances.

The F800 MCU range features a capacitance-to-digital converter (CDC) that enables excellent touch sensing in end products.

The high-resolution CDC, which features a 40-microsecond acquisition time and a 25 MIPS CPU, provides sophisticated and highly responsive touch-sense functions to replace mechanical buttons, sliders and wheels.

Advanced 16bit resolution allows the CDC and firmware to compensate for changes in geometry and laminates that may occur between prototyping and production, making the F800 MCUs accurate but improving end-product reliability.

The CDC requires little CPU overhead, allowing the MCU to perform other tasks and improving system efficiency.

Most electronic systems are being optimised to reduce power consumption, which is often a challenge when adding features such as touch sensing.

The F800 offers a wake-on-touch capability, allowing it to be placed in power-saving modes, yet wake quickly upon a touch-sense event, saving overall system power.

The F800 touch-sense MCU range is supported by the Quicksense Studio, a common development environment for all Quicksense devices, including the F700 high pin-count touch-sense MCUs and the Si1102/Si1120 proximity and ambient light sensors.

The Quicksense Studio configuration wizard allows designers using an intuitive software GUI to select which functions they want implemented, such as capacitive touch-sense buttons, sliders and wheels, and then easily auto-generate the software to set up and calibrate these functions.

Designers can also test their implementation and review a graphical display of the system performance.

The Quicksense F800 touch-sense MCUs are supported by a low-cost development kit, the C8051F800DK, which includes everything required to immediately begin system design, including the Quicksense Studio, IDE, target board, cables and power supply.