Fully differential touch screen controller with wide input dynamic range for thin displays

As today’s smartphone displays become thinner, the coupling capacitance between the display electrodes and touch screen panel (TSP) electrodes is increasing significantly. The increased capacitance easily introduces time-varying display signals into the TSP, deteriorating the touch performance. In this research, we demonstrate that the maximum peak display noise in the time domain is approximately 30% of the maximum voltage difference of the display grayscale through analysis of the structure and operation of displays. Then, to mitigate display noise, we propose a circuit solution that uses a fully differential charge amplifier with an input dynamic range wider than the maximum peak of the display noise. A test chip was fabricated using a 0.35 μm CMOS process and achieved a signal-to-noise ratio of 41 dB for a 6-mm-diameter metal pillar touch when display pulses with 5-V swing were driven at 100 kHz.