Apple Inc.

Atmel Corporation

Synaptics Corporation

Vivek Pant

Shahrooz Shahparnia

Vemund Kval Bakken

Moshe H Malkin

Marduke Yousefpor

Kishore Sundara-Rajan

Sumant Ranganathan

Izhar Bentov

Christoph Horst Krah

Trond Jarle Pedersen

Samuel Daniel Brunet

John Greer Elias

Esat Yilmaz

Martin Paul Grunthaner

Yingxuan Li

Weijun Yao

Martin John Simmons

Grahame K Reynolds

John Stanley Dubery

Christopher John Hill

Sherif Hanna

Steven Porter Hotelling

Joseph Kurth Reynolds

Adam L Schwartz

Luben Hristov Hristov

Ray Ling Chang

Christopher Tenzin Mullens

Andrew Fuller

Manu Agarwal

John Weinerth

Isaac W Chan

Adam Geboff

Farzaneh Shahrokhi

Prathit Bugnait

Shwetabh Verma

Bernard J Hermes

A touch sensor panel is disclosed. In some examples, the touch sensor panel comprises a plurality of touch node electrodes. In some examples, the touch sensor panel comprises a touch controller configured to drive and sense the plurality of touch node electrodes in a fully bootstrapped configuration to obtain a fully bootstrapped touch image, drive and sense the plurality of touch node electrodes in a second configuration, different from the fully bootstrapped configuration, to obtain a second touch image, the second touch image including an effect of water on the touch sensor panel, and determine a final touch image based on the fully bootstrapped touch image and the second touch image, the final touch image not including the effect of the water on the touch sensor panel. In some examples, the second configuration comprises a mutual capacitance configuration. In some examples, the second configuration comprises a partially bootstrapped configuration.

Pixelated self-capacitance water rejection

A wearable electronic device comprises a multi-segment force sensor and a signal aggregator. The sensor comprises at least a first segment and a second segment connected to a flexible substrate material. A first portion of the substrate material (to which the first segment is attached) and a second portion of the substrate material (to which the second segment is attached) collectively wrap at least partially around a portion of an individual's body. The signal aggregator receives respective signals indicative of forces applied by an individual to the segments, and causes a representation of the respective signals to be transmitted to an application processing engine.

Segmented force sensors for wearable devices

Improved sensing can include modified sampling and/or processing to improve performance against noise due to environmental variations and interference. In some examples, improved interference rejection can be achieved by sampling a sensor multiple times during settled periods. In some examples, the excitation signal and sampling window can be dynamically adjusted to satisfy drift and/or interference specifications based on various operating conditions or the operating environment. In some examples, drift performance can be traded off to improve interference performance. In some examples, improved immunity to environmental variations can be achieved by equalizing sensor outputs in accordance with characterization of the sensing system. In some examples, improved performance can be achieved by sampling the sensor continuously and using an optimized window function to improve performance against noise.

Drift invariant processing

Quasi-continuous-time sampling of discrete-time sampled signals

Power consumption of touch sensing operations for touch sensitive devices can be reduced by implementing a coarse scan (e.g., banked common mode scan) to coarsely detect the presence or absence of an object touching or proximate to a touch sensor panel and the results of the coarse scan can be used to dynamically adjust the operation of the touch sensitive device to perform or not perform a fine scan (e.g., targeted active mode scan). In some examples, the results of the coarse scan can be used to program a touch controller for the next touch sensing frame to idle when no touch event is detected or to perform a fine scan when one or more touch events are detected. In some examples, the results of the coarse scan can be used to abort a scheduled fine scan during the current touch sensing frame when no touch event is detected.

Coarse scan and targeted active mode scan for touch and stylus

Active styli, methods and non-transitory computer readable storage media can be used for mitigating noise coupling from an active stylus to a touch sensing system. An active stylus can include a force sensor that can be used to detect stylus touch-down and lift-off events. Based on a touch-down and lift-off events, the stylus can generate stimulation signals and ramp up or ramp down the amplitude of the stimulation signals. Additionally or alternatively, an active stylus can receive information to synchronize the active stylus with a touch-sensitive device. Based on the information, the stylus can synchronize generation of stimulation signals with the stylus scan performed by the touch-sensitive device. The stimulation signals can be ramped up during a guard band period before a stylus scan and can be ramped down during a guard band period after the stylus scan.

Method for stylus touch-down and lift-off noise mitigation

A multi-chip touch architecture for scalability can include one or more touch controller application specific integrated circuits (ASICs), and one or more switching circuits coupled between the one or more touch controller ASICs and the touch sensor panel. The number of touch controller ASICs and switching circuits can be scaled based on the size of the touch sensor panel. The touch controller ASICs can include an interface for data transfer between the touch controller ASICs to allow for parallel processing of an image of touch by more than one touch controller ASIC. The touch controller ASIC can also include a memory directly accessible by more than one processing circuit (e.g., hardware accelerators), and circuitry to dynamically adjust the coupling between portions (e.g., banks) of memory and inputs of the one or more processing circuits to minimize data transfer and improve processing speeds.

Multi-chip touch architecture for scalability

Position-based sensing methods and systems can be used to transmit data from an input device to a touch-sensitive device. For example, the touch sensing system may perform one or more coarse input device sub-scans to determine a coarse location of the input device. The coarse location can be used to select one or more touch sensors (or sensor channels) to sample for decoding data encoded in the stimulation signals from the input device. During one or more fine input device sub-scans, the touch sensing system can determine a fine location of the input device and decode the data from the input device sampled from the selected touch sensors (or sensor channels).

Position-based stylus communication

A touch sensing system can demodulate sensor data using a dynamically adjusted demodulation waveform and/or demodulation window. The demodulation waveform and/or demodulation window can be dynamically adjusted to account for dynamically changing noise in a touch sensing system. The system can dynamically adjust the demodulation window based on noise measured by the touch sensing system to generate an optimized or otherwise noise-tailored window to suppress detected noise. In some examples, the noise measured by the touch sensing system can be sampled from sense channels localized to a detected touch.

Dynamic adjustment of demodulation waveform

Power consumption of touch sensing operations for touch sensitive devices can be reduced by implementing one or more coarse scans to coarsely detect the presence or absence of an object touching or proximate to a touch sensor panel and dynamically adjusting the operation of the touch sensitive device to perform or not perform one or more steps of a fine scan based on the results of the one or more coarse scans. In some examples, the fine scan can be scheduled, and one or more steps of the fine scan can be aborted when no touch is detected at touch sensors scanned during the one or more steps. Sense channels unused due to the aborted fine scan steps can be powered down during aborted fine scan steps.

Coarse scan and targeted active mode scan for touch

A method of one embodiment includes generating, by a stylus, a composite signal. The composite signal includes a first signal having a first frequency, the first signal being used by a touch-sensing device to determine a position of the stylus relative to the touch-sensing device, and a second signal having a second frequency. The second signal may include status information such as an amount of force exerted on the stylus, battery information, orientation information, information indicating whether the stylus is within a threshold distance of the touch-sensing device, information indicating a status of a button of the stylus, and/or information indicating input from a user of the stylus. Furthermore, the second frequency is higher than the first frequency. The stylus sends the composite signal to the touch-sensing device, and an electrode array of the touch-sensing device may receive the composite signal. The touch-sensing device may determine a position of the stylus by processing the composite signal and may also determine the status information by processing the composite signal.

Active stylus with a parallel communication channel

In one embodiment, a method comprises generating, by a controller, a plurality of drive signals. The method further includes simultaneously transmitting, by the controller, the plurality of drive signals to a plurality of drive electrodes disposed on a touch sensor. The method further includes sensing a sense electrode of a plurality of sense electrodes disposed on the touch sensor. The sensing comprises measuring, for each drive electrode of the plurality of drive electrodes, at least one value indicative of a capacitance between the sense electrode and the drive electrode.

Touch sensor with simultaneously driven drive electrodes

A method of one embodiment includes generating, by a touch-sensing device, a first signal comprising information identifying a first electrode line of an electrode array of the touch-sensing device, the first signal having a first strength. The first electrode sends the first signal to a stylus, which receives the first signal, the first signal having a received strength. The stylus sends a second signal comprising information based on the received first signal, and the touch-sensing device receives the second signal. A position of the stylus is determined based at least in part on the information identifying the first electrode line and the received strength of the first signal.

Active stylus communication and position system

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San Jose, CA, United States of America

Vivek Pant