Apple Inc.

Amit Nayyar

Marduke Yousefpor

Sean Erik O'Connor

Sagar Rajiv Vaze

Morakinyo John Aina

Peter Csaszar

Joseph Kurth Reynolds

John Stephen Smith

Shahrooz Shahparnia

Hyunwoo Nho

Jie Won Ryu

Szu-Hsien Lee

Xiaokai Li

Myungjoon Choi

Rungrot Kitsomboonloha

Pei-En Chang

Vehbi Calayir

Kaikai Guo

Differential driving and/or sensing can reduce noise in a touch screen. In some examples, the touch screen can include column and row electrodes routed vertically in the active area. In some examples, the touch electrodes and/or routing traces can be implemented using metal mesh in first and second metal layers. To improve optical performance, overlapping portions of metal mesh can be designed to provide an appearance of uniform width/area. In some examples, a dielectric layer can have an increased thickness and/or a reduced dielectric constant, and/or metal mesh in the first metal layer can be flooded with a transparent conductive material. In some examples, routing traces can be disposed beneath touch electrodes and/or metal mesh for touch electrodes can be flooded with a transparent conductive material without flooding metal mesh for routing traces. In some examples, touch electrodes can be interleaved within a touch node to improve differential cancelation.

Architecture for differential drive and sense touch technology

Embodiments presented herein relate to reducing visual artifacts on an electronic display caused by an intra-frame pause. To do so, the intra-frame pause may be divided into smaller intra-frame pause segments. The intra-frame pause segments may be applied to the display during different image frames and/or at different locations on the electronic display. For example, each intra-frame pause segment may be applied to a different location on the electronic display. In some embodiments, multiple intra-frame pause segments may be applied during a single image frame. In some embodiments, the intra-frame pause segments may be applied to various image frames and at various location on the electronic display according to a pattern. To reduce band flickering that may be caused by the different locations of the intra-frame pause segments, an emission duty of one or more rows of pixels of the display may be adjusted.

Mitigation of tearing from intra-frame pause

Touch sensor panels (or touch screens) can improve signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) using touch electrode patterns for differential drive and/or differential sense techniques. In some examples, a touch sensor panel can include a two-dimensional array of touch nodes formed from a plurality of touch electrodes. Each column (or row) of touch nodes can be driven with a plurality of drive signals. For example, a first column (or row) of touch nodes can be driven by a first drive signal applied to one or more first touch nodes in the first column (or row) and a second drive signal applied to a one or more second touch nodes of the first column (or row). In some examples, the first drive signal and the second drive signal can be complimentary drive signals. In some examples, each row (or column) of touch electrodes can be sensed by differential sense circuitry.

Differential drive and sense for touch sensor panel

This relates to a touch sensor panel including: a substrate having a first surface and a second surface; a first touch node formed by a first drive line and a first section of a first sense line both routed on the first surface of the substrate; and a second touch node formed by a second drive line routed on the first surface of the substrate and a second section of the first sense line routed on the second surface of the substrate.

Touch panel with non-uniform touch node layout

A touch controller can dynamically balance performance criteria, such as signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) thresholds, with power consumption for touch sensitive devices. A touch controller can be configured to reduce power consumption by reconfiguring bank boundaries for an active mode scan so as to reduce the number of banks scanned with a banked active mode scan. Additionally or alternatively, the stimulation signal amplitude and integration time of the touch controller can be dynamically adjusted to balance performance criteria with power consumption. Default integration times and default stimulation signal amplitudes can be increased in higher-noise operating environments to raise SNR, and can be reduced to save power in lower-noise operating environments. Additionally or alternatively, the touch scanning rate of the touch controller can be dynamically adjusted to reduce power consumption of the touch sensitive device or to reallocate touch sensing frames to increase integration times and thereby SNR performance.

SNR-aware active mode touch scans with electrode reallocation

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Amit Nayyar