Case Study: Cypress Semiconductor achieves robust, optimized touchscreen designs across devices with COMSOL Multiphysics

Cypress Semiconductor - Customer Case Study

Cypress Semiconductor, a leading supplier of touchscreen and touch-sensing solutions, faced the challenge of designing capacitive touchscreens that perform reliably across a wide range of products and environments—from smartphones and laptops to automotive and industrial applications. Variations in stack-up materials, cover-lens thickness, finger or stylus position, moisture, and mounting conditions required extensive electrostatic modeling to ensure accurate mutual-capacitance sensing and robust operation.

Comsol addressed this by providing COMSOL Multiphysics with the AC/DC Module, plus the Application Builder and COMSOL Server for app deployment and cluster/cloud computing to run large parameter studies (e.g., cover lens thicknesses from 0.5–1.5 mm). Using Comsol’s tools and floating-potential boundary modeling, Cypress engineers ran thousands of simulations with virtually unlimited compute nodes, created simulation apps for sales and field teams, and shared results globally—enabling faster, more customizable designs, reducing R&D involvement, and letting support teams explore thousands of design options without occupying COMSOL Multiphysics license seats.

Cypress Semiconductor

Peter Vavaroutsos

Member of the Touchscreen Modeling Group