A 10.1" 56-channel, 183 uW/electrode, 0.73 mm2/sensor high SNR 3D hover sensor based on enhanced signal refining and fine error calibrating techniques

Abstract

This paper presents a high SNR self-capacitance sensing 3D hover sensor that does not use panel offset cancelation blocks. Not only reducing noise components, but increasing the signal components together, this paper achieved a high SNR performance while consuming very low power and die-area. Thanks to the proposed separated structure between driving and sensing circuits of the self-capacitance sensing scheme (SCSS), the signal components are increased without using high-voltage MOS sensing amplifiers which consume big die-area and power and badly degrade SNR. In addition, since a huge panel offset problem in SCSS is solved exploiting the panel's natural characteristics, other costly resources are not required. Furthermore, display noise and parasitic capacitance mismatch errors are compressed. We demonstrate a 39dB SNR at a 1cm hover point under 240Hz scan rate condition with noise experiments, while consuming 183uW/electrode and 0.73mm2/sensor, which are the power per electrode and the die-area per sensor, respectively.