Touch Screen technology

Posted by aayush mishra on June 15th, 2019

TouchScreen Technology :

Touch screen technology has been around for a number of years but advanced touch screen technology has come on in leaps and bounds recently. Companies are including this technology into more of their products. The three most common touch screen technologies include resistive, capacitive and SAW (surface acoustic wave). Most of low end touch screen devices contain on a standard printed circuit plug-in board and are used on SPI protocol. The system has two parts, namely; hardware and software. The hardware architecture consists of a stand-alone embedded system using an  8-bit microcontroller, several types of interface and driver circuits. The system software driver is developed using an interactive C programming language.

Types of Touch Screen Technology:

The Touch screen is a 2-dimensional sensing device made of 2 sheets of material separated by spacers. There are four main touch screen technologies: Resistive, Capacitive, Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) and infrared (IR).

Resistive:

Resistive touch screen is composed of a flexible top layer made of polythene and a rigid bottom layer made of glass separated by insulating dots, attached to a touch screen controller. Resistive touch screen panels are more affordable but offering only 75% of light monitor and the layer can be damaged by sharp objects. Resistive touch screen is further divided into 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, 8- wired resistive touch screen. The construction design of all these modules is similar but there is a major distinction in each of its methods to determine the coordinates of touch.

Capacitive:

A capacitive touch screen panel is coated with a material that stores electrical charges. The capacitive systems can transmit up to 90% of light from the monitor. It is divided into two categories. In Surface-capacitive technology only one side of the insulator is coated with a conducting layer.

Whenever a human finger touches the screen, conduction of electric charges occurs over the uncoated layer which results in the formation of dynamic capacitor. The controller then detects the position of touch by measuring the change in capacitance at the four corners of the screen.

Infrared:

In infrared touch screen technology, an array of X and Y axis is fitted with pairs of IR Leds and photo detectors. Photo detectors will detect any image in the pattern of light emitted by the Leds whenever the user touches the screen.

Surface Acoustic wave:

The surface acoustic wave technology contains two transducers placed along X-axis and Y-axis of the monitor’s glass plate along with some reflectors. When the screen is touched, the waves are absorbed and a touch is detected at that point. These reflectors reflect all electrical signals sent from one transducer to another. This technology provides excellent throughput and quality.

For more ideas and tips for marketing practices for small business visit:- Technology Moon