Qualcomm Mems Technologies, Inc.

Synaptics Corporation

Applied Materials, Inc.

Spectrove Inc.

Opervu, Inc.

Other

Kasra Khazeni

Manish Kothari

Joseph Kurth Reynolds

Gang Xu

Marc Mignard

Surya Prakash Ganti

Jeff Sampsell

Stephen L Morein

Ion Bita

Alok Govil

Farook Afsari

Kamiar Fariba

Ronald K Woods

Petr Shepelev

Evgeni Petrovich Gousev

Russell Wayne Gruhlke

Kostadin Dimitrov Djordjev

Eric Scott Bohannon

Marek Mienko

Zhong Qiang Hua

Damien Berget

Jonathan Charles Griffiths

Zhengquan Tan

David Leslie Heald

Kollengode S Narayanan

Bangalore Ramaswamiengar Natarajan

Gaurav Sethi

Eugene Tzou

Rihui He

Kambiz Farnaam

Sriram Akella

Faraj Aalaei

Saeid Ghafouri

Donovan Lee

The present application relates to a system for performing time-resolved interferometric spectroscopy of incoming light. In some embodiments, the system includes one or more optical elements, a photo-detector, a capacitance detector, and one or more processors. Upon application of a varying input signal to the one or more optical elements, a change to an optical characteristic is caused resulting in a changing interference pattern produced by the incoming light incident on the one or more optical elements. During the application of the varying input signal, the photo-detector may detect an intensity of light output from the one or more optical elements and the capacitance detector may detect a capacitance of the one or more optical elements.

MEMS device for interferometric spectroscopy

Certain embodiments may relate to apparatuses and methods for performing surgical procedures. For example, a method may comprise initiating detection and tracking of at least one surgical instrument (including associated surgical material) within a surgical area. The method may further comprise performing a surgical procedure with the at least one surgical instrument and material and ending detection and tracking of the at least one surgical instrument and material within the surgical area. The method may further comprise displaying at least one indication of location status of the at least one surgical instrument.

System and method to detect and track surgical instruments and/or surgical material

Embodiments described herein include a method for avoiding display noise in a capacitive touch sensing device that includes sensing a touch input in a sensing region of an input device at a first touch sensing frequency. The method also includes analyzing incoming display data for display data noise at the first touch sensing frequency and at a second touch sensing frequency. If the display data noise at the first touch sensing frequency is higher than a threshold, touch sensing frequency is adjusted to the second touch sensing frequency where the display data noise is lower than the threshold. If the display data noise at the first touch sensing frequency is lower than the threshold, sensing is continued at the first touch frequency.

Active avoidance of display noise in simultaneous touch and display

An input device can be capacitive coupled to earth ground and noise sources which can interfere with the ability of the input device to detect an input object. To mitigate the effects from these capacitive couplings, the input device drives a modulated capacitive sensing signal onto a plurality of sensor electrodes in parallel. The sensor electrodes are coupled to respective analog front ends (AFEs) which generate an output signal for each of the sensor electrodes. The input device combines the output signals for the sensor electrodes to generate a normalization value. For example, the output signals may be digital values which are summed by the input device to generate the normalization value. The input device then divides each of the output signals by the normalization value to result in a normalized signal corresponding to each of the sensor electrodes.

Normalizing capacitive sensing measurements to reduce effects of low ground mass and noise

This disclosure generally provides an input device modulates a reference voltage used to provide power to a plurality of power supplies and acquires, while modulating the reference voltage, first resulting signals from a plurality of sensor electrodes simultaneously at a central receiver. In input device also acquires second resulting signals from the sensor electrodes at a plurality of local receivers and mitigates an effect a grounding condition has on the second resulting signal using the first resulting signals.

Modulating a reference voltage to preform capacitive sensing

An input device is configured to detect force being applied to an input region of the device by an input object, in addition to the position of the input object using touch sensing methods. Aspects include driving a force sensing electrode of the input device using an anti-guarding voltage alternating with a ground or guard voltage, while driving the touch sensing electrodes with a reference voltage, to obtain touch measurements, force measurements, interference measurements, double the force signal, and/o double the touch signal for differential touch and force detection. Aspects also include driving sensor electrodes using orthogonal signals and performing in-phase and quadrature demodulation of the received signal for simultaneous and independent touch and force measurements.

Differential force and touch sensing

Techniques for removing display-based corrupting components from a capacitive sensing signal when display and capacitive sensing is performed at or nearly at the same time. A routing carrying display related signals (e.g., a source signal for sub-pixel updating) may induce a corrupting current into a routing for carrying capacitive sensing signals. This corrupting current would reduce the ability to determine presence of an input object via the sensing signal. Therefore, the corrupting signal is effectively removed from a signal received from a sensor electrode when driven for sensing. The corrupting component may be removed either in analog or digitally. In analog, the corrupting component is removed via a tunable capacitance. Digitally, a corrupting component is calculated as an impulse response convolved with the source driver voltage. This corrupting component is then subtracted from a digital value output by the sensing circuitry to obtain a 'clean' value.

Active canceling of display noise in simultaneous display and touch sensing using an impulse response

Embodiments of the disclosure provided herein provide a device and method of using the device that is able to improve the detection of user input provided to an input device while one or more sources of noise are present during the detection process. One or more of the embodiments disclosed herein may include a scanning process and a signal processing technique that is able to more reliably detect the presence and position of an input object by reducing the effect of noise on a resulting signal that is generated during a capacitive sensing process. In some configurations, the scanning and signal processing techniques disclosed herein can be improved by increasing a capacitive sensing device's ability to detect the presence of an input object by improving the signal-to-noise ratio of the data collected during a capacitive sensing process.

Method and apparatus for improving capacitive sensing detection

This disclosure generally provides an input device that includes a matrix sensor that includes a plurality of sensor electrodes arranged in rows on a common surface or plane. The input device may include a plurality of sensor modules coupled to the sensor electrodes that measure capacitive sensing signals corresponding to the electrodes. Instead of measuring sensor electrodes that are in the same column, the embodiments herein simultaneously measure capacitive sensing signals on at least two sensor electrodes that are in the same row. In one example, the sensor electrodes in the row being measured are spaced the same distance from a side of a substrate coupling the electrodes to the sensor modules and may have approximately the same electrical time constant.

Row-based sensing on matrix pad sensors

Techniques for removing display-based corrupting components from a capacitive sensing signal are provided. A routing carrying display related signals (e.g., a source signal for sub-pixel updating) may induce corrupting current into a routing for carrying capacitive sensing signals. This corrupting current may reduce the ability to determine presence of an input object via the sensing signal. Therefore, the corrupting signal is effectively removed by driving the display elements with a dot inversion technique and by performing capacitive sensing for a sensor electrode during a time in which an even number of display rows are driven for display updates. Dot inversion causes the corrupting current to alternate polarity. Thus, driving sensor electrodes in a period of time in which an even number of rows is driven means that an equal number of positive and negative polarity corrupting currents are induced into the sensing signal.

Touch noise canceling for dot-inversion driving scheme

This disclosure generally provides an input device that includes a reference voltage modulator that modulates reference voltage rails when performing capacitive sensing. In one embodiment, reference voltage rails are coupled to a DC power source which provides power to operate a panel that includes a display screen integrated with a touch sensing region. Before performing capacitive sensing, the input device may isolate the DC power source from the reference voltage rails and use the reference voltage rails to modulate the rails&#x2014;e.g., Vand V. The input device may include a receiver that simultaneously acquires resulting signals from a plurality of display and/or sensor electrodes when modulating the reference voltage rails. The resulting signals can then be processed to determine if an input object is interacting with the input device.

An input device having an anti-static layer coupled to a grounding element such as a cellphone bottom chassis via a current hindering circuit having a resistive circuit element. Without the current hindering circuit having a resistive circuit element, a large amount of the current from an input object would flow through the connection to the grounding element and would not flow to a receiver channel for processing. This decreases the signal strength within the receiver channel, making sensing more difficult to perform. However, with the current hindering circuit having a resistive circuit element, current is hindered from flowing to ground and thus flows to the receiver channel, thereby increasing the signal strength. The current hindering circuit having a resistive circuit element may be a resistor or a Zener diode that is directed to prevent current flow from the anti-static layer to the grounding element until a significant voltage has built up across the Zener diode.

Input device having anti-static layer bypass

Techniques for removing display-based corrupting components from a capacitive sensing signal when display and capacitive sensing is performed at or nearly at the same time. A routing carrying display related signals (e.g., a source signal for sub-pixel updating) may induce a corrupting current into a routing for carrying capacitive sensing signals. This corrupting current would reduce the ability to determine presence of an input object via the sensing signal. Therefore, the corrupting signal is effectively removed by averaging sensing signals from two consecutive frames together. Because displays perform frame inversion, in which the voltage polarity provided to a sub-pixel for updates is reversed each frame, the corrupting current reverses in polarity each frame. Therefore, adding two subsequent frames together cancels out the corrupting signal.

Sensing frame averaging for cancelling display noise in simultaneous display and touch sensing

Growing community of inventors

San Jose, CA, United States of America

Kasra Khazeni