doi: 10.3850/978-3-9815370-4-8_0017

ABSTRACT

Microcontrollers (MCUs) are extensively used in consumer devices for specific purposes because they are tiny, cheap, and low-power. Any time-consuming algorithm and any large-size program are not suited for MCUs. Recently, we found that the conventional multi-touch algorithm becomes computationally expensive to handle the applications of large- sized touch panels. Although a more high-end MCU can obtain an improvement on speed, it would increase manu- facturing cost and operating power consumption as well. In the whole multi-touch algorithm flow, point tracking is the most computationally expensive part. Fortunately, touch point tracking is similar to the pin-assignment problem in EDA. To accelerate tracking, we employ EDA techniques, such as clustering, to speed up our multi-touch algorithm. Besides, we prove that the tracking problem would be solved in O(n) time for practical cases and without losing its ac- curacy after clustering. Furthermore, we apply computational geometry techniques to develop an effcient clustering method. Experimental results show that clustering is efficient and effective. For the necessary requirement of large- area touch panels having 20 touch points, we can reduce the runtime by up to 70%. Besides, our multi-touch algorithm may support up to 80 touch points accompanied by a low-cost MCU.

---

Full Text (PDF)

© 2015 EDAA. All rights reserved.