A PAPR Reduction Technique for Fast Touch Sensors Adopting a Multiple Frequency Driving Method on Large Display Panels

The multiple frequency driving method (MFDM) capacitive touch system (CTS), which drives transmit (TX) electrodes in parallel, has been developed to improve the touch-sensitivity of large touch screens at high speed. However, when driving multiple TX electrodes at the same time, TX signals are merged through the touch panel, which results in increasing the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of combined signals. Due to the high PAPR, the signal is distorted out of the power amplifier’s linear range, causing a touch malfunction. The MFDM CTS can avoid this problem by reducing the drive voltage or partially driving the TX electrodes in parallel. However, these methods cause a significant performance drop with respect to signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the MFDM systems. This paper proposes a stack method which reduces PAPR effectively without the performance degradation of MFDM and achieves real-time touch sensitivity in large display panels. The proposed method allocates a suitable phase for each TX electrode to reduce the peak power of combined signals. Instead of investigating all of the phases for the total number of TX electrodes, the optimal phase is estimated from the highest frequency to the lowest one and fixed one by one, which can reduce the required time to find a suitable phase considerably. As a result, it enables high-speed sensing of multi-touch on a large touch screen and effectively reduces PAPR to secure high signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). Through experiments, it was verified that the proposed method in this paper has an SNR of 39.36 dB, achieving a gain of 19.35 and 5.98 dB compared to the existing touch system method and the algorithm used in the communication system, respectively.