QuickSense™ Portfolio Includes Capacitive Sensing Microcontrollers and Infrared Proximity Sensors
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Silicon Labs has just introduced the QuickSense™ human interface portfolio, offering industry-leading capacitive and infrared sensing devices to meet the demands of advanced user interfaces. Silicon Labs is uniquely positioned to be the only supplier offering MCUs and sensing technologies with a common software environment to program, debug, and analyze proximity sense, ambient light sense and capacitive touch sense solutions. Capitalizing on our leadership in high-performance, analog-intensive, mixed-signal ICs, the QuickSense family of products offers the fastest sensing rates, the highest sensitivity, and an intuitive and easy-to-use development tool called QuickSense Studio.
Si1102 and Si1120 Infrared Proximity Sensors
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The QuickSense™ Si1102 and Si1120 are the industry’s most sensitive active infrared proximity sensors, enabling innovative touch-less human interface applications with ultra-low power advantages. These devices open up many new functions for end-products including invisible user detection, tamper and intrusion detection, and when coupled with an MCU: touch-less motion sensing and advanced gesturing capabilities. Comprised of an infrared LED driver, an infrared photodiode, an ambient light sensor (Si1120), and control logic, the devices are packaged in a 3x3 mm clear DFN.
C8051F800 and C8051F700 Capacitive Sensing Microcontrollers
The QuickSense™ C8051F8xx family of capacitive sensing MCUs provides an easy and reliable solution for capacitive buttons, sliders, wheels and capacitive proximity sensing. The C8051F800 family builds upon the C8051F700 family of capacitive touch MCUs by adding a lower-pin count, small form factor option to the industry’s fastest capacitive touch sense solutions. The C8051F800 offers 16- and 20-pin package options to the existing 48- and 64-pin C8051F700, providing more options to fit products with the optimal pin count, size and cost.
The QuickSense Family is a powerful set of human interface solutions. This figure illustrates the combination of infrared and capacitive sensing enabled with the following:
- Si1120-A-GM infrared proximity sensor with ALS
- C8051F700/F800 MCU supporting capacitive buttons, a capacitive slider, a capacitive proximity sensor, control of the Si1120 and its associated infrared LEDs
- C8051F34x USB MCU
- QuickSense Studio
Silicon Labs offers a variety of evaluation kits and demonstration hardware to serve as valuable implementation examples. All but one of the demonstration platforms includes an MCU control element to assist your design-in efforts.
Si1120 Infrared Slider Demo
The Si1120 Infrared Slider Demo is a Silicon Labs patent-pending infrared touchless slider. This innovative touchless slider boasts excellent range, visible LED tracking and bi-axial set-point gesture recognition. The USB-powered demonstration is controlled by an ultra-low power Silicon Labs C8051F900 MCU and incorporates an Si1120, two infrared LEDs and eight visible LEDs.
The QuickSense Studio development environment supports this unique gesture recognition demonstration. Within the Studio environment is a powerful performance analysis tool that enables real-time reflectivity monitoring.
Si1102 Mini-Proximity Sensing Demo
The Mini-Proximity Demo provides a simple infrared proximity demonstration with the Si1102 QuickSense infrared proximity sensor. The Si1102 threshold output controls an invisible infrared light emitting diode, senses an approaching object and illuminates a visible LED revealing the devices superior sensitivity and range.
The coin-cell battery-operated board enables demonstration under a variety of lighting conditions. For convenience, two thumb-wheel potentiometers provide an ability to set the sensitivity threshold to adjust for varying range requirements. In addition, test points exist for expanded evaluation purposes.
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QuickSense Studio
Quickly configure all of your human interface sensors with the easy to use QuickSense Studio. The Studio provides an intuitive development flow, a graphical configuration wizard, valuable and trusted APIs, and performance monitoring tools to ensure that your designs are both responsive and robust.