Fieldscale SENSE development platform for touch sensors

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STMicroelectronics and Fieldscale have joined forces to simplify development of touch-enabled user interfaces for smart devices containing ST’s STM32 microcontrollers (MCUs). Fieldscale’s SENSE development platform now includes support for ST’s Arm Cortex-based 32-bit MCUs, which should enable users to take a faster and more efficient route to market.

Fieldscale SENSE is an end-to-end solution for the design, schematic capture and system-level simulation of capacitive touch sensors. The cloud-based development platform implements sophisticated electromagnetic algorithms, which drives prediction of the system performance. Users can optimise the design and quickly re-simulate to fine-tune the performance before committing to hardware. The latest version lets STM32 users quickly design the touch sensor and PCB layout for virtual system simulation purposes.

As a cloud-based development platform accessed via an intuitive web interface, the product enables users to online evaluate their touch sensors using powerful field solvers and algorithms. Unlike conventional PC-based software, there are no installation challenges or system-performance limitations. Simulation results have also been validated against measurements from actual touch-sensor manufacturers, confirming the results are accurate to within 2%.

Before committing to building physical prototypes, with Fieldscale SENSE users can: design or import capacitive touch sensor layout as a standard DXF or Gerber file(s); easily create the complete 3D model of the sensor by simply clicking their way through material and connections assignment; simulate the touch-sensor performance including the effects of using a stylus or wearing gloves; add RF conducted noise into the system, to evaluate the noise immunity of your system; and understand effects such as coupling between traces and electrodes that can interfere with the touch-sensor performance, to identify required modifications.

For more information: https://blog.st.com/sense-stm32-fieldscale/.