Overview

Capacitive Touch sensor systems allow enhanced human machine interfaces which can be operated by simple finger touch to be designed with ease, and also enable manufacturing costs to be lowered. The use of these systems as control panels is spreading rapidly in a wide range of fields such as household appliances (white goods), AV equipment, office equipment, game consoles, mobile phones, and portable music players. Moving forward, the market for such systems is expected to continue to grow. There is rapidly growing demand in products incorporating touch sensor systems for touch panels that are more compact, lower in cost, use less power, and deliver better performance. This has spurred demand for single-chip devices combining a touch sensor IC to detect touch events and an MCU to receive detection data and control the system.

Within the well-established 16-bit standard R8C microcontrollers lineup of Renesas Electronics, the R8C/3xT Group is ideal for touch sensor systems, integrating a capacitive touch detection circuit providing the functionality of a touch sensor IC. This meets the requirements of customers for compact size, low power consumption, and strong noise tolerance.

Capacitive Touch MCUs for details