Apple Inc.

Sabino Joseph Pietrangelo, Ii

Tsung-Ting Tsai

Rui Liu

Ari Y Benbasat

Abbas Jamshidi-Roudbari

Chuang Qian

Aleksandr N Polyakov

Eric S Winokur

Sai Zhang

Andreas Johannes Koeberl

Tiffany T Moy

Yurii Morozov

Warren S A Rieutort-Louis

Branislav Jovanovic

Andrew William Shorten

Liqun Yang

Techniques for rejecting apparent (but false) touches caused by objects such as water droplets located in areas with parasitic capacitive paths to ground are disclosed. To minimize these false touches, one or more guard conductors can be located in proximity to the housing and driven with a stimulation signal to shield objects from being capacitively coupled to ground through the housing. In some examples images of touch can be obtained from a non-bootstrapped or bootstrapped scan and also an extended bootstrapped scan wherein the guard conductor is driven with a stimulation signal that has the same characteristics as the stimulation signal being applied to the sensed touch nodes. In some examples, the results of the extended bootstrapped scan can be subtracted from the non-bootstrapped or bootstrapped scan to identify and reject apparent touches resulting from capacitive coupling to ground.

Touch sensing with water rejection

Visibility of the metal mesh touch electrodes can be mitigated using one or more mitigation techniques. In some examples, the boundary between touch electrodes and/or the boundary between a touch electrode and a routing trace of another touch electrode and/or the boundary between two routing traces can be non-linear. In some examples, dummy cuts can be made within an area of a touch electrode region (e.g., while maintaining the same electrical potential for the touch electrode region). In some examples, notches can be made in the metal mesh. In some examples, the location of cuts and/or notches can be optimized to mitigate visibility of the metal mesh. In some examples, some or all of the visibility mitigations may be used in combination in a touch screen.

Metal mesh touch electrodes with visibility mitigations

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Mountain View, CA, United States of America

Sabino Joseph Pietrangelo, Ii