Product of the Week: Infineon Technologies’ PSoC 4000T Capacitive Sensing MCU

November 27, 2023

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Versatility and efficiency are two commonly used terms when it comes to MCUs, especially when referring to capacitive sensing MCUs that are used in a wide range of applications and requiring the additional enhanced user experience, durability, and adaptability features.

One solution packed with the aforementioned features is Infineon Technologies’ PSoC 4000T family of microcontrollers (MCUs) based on the Arm Cortex-M0+ CPU and featuring Infineon’s fifth generation high-performance CAPSENSE capacitive sensing technology. The MCUs are highlighted most for their capacitive sensing subsystem, and programmable and reconfigurable analog and digital blocks which are designed to support low power applications such as wearables, hearables, and other smart connected IoT products.

Infineon Technologies’ PSoC 4000T MCU In Action

The 32-bit MCU subsystem supports the 48-MHz Arm Cortex-M0+ CPU with single-cycle multiply. For system memory, the MCU is equipped with up to 64 KB of flash with read accelerator and up to 8 KB of SRAM. Although this may seem like the heart of the system, it’s truly Infineon’s 5th generation CAPSENSE and multi-sense HMI technologies.

CAPSENSE sensing is designed to support both self and mutual capacitive sensing techniques. With 16 sensor inputs, the technology features up to 16 self-capacitive inputs and up to 64 mutual-capacitive inputs. Based on a ratio-metric sensing architecture in Multi-Sense Converter Low Power (MSCLP), CAPSENSE provides signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) (>5:1) and liquid tolerance for capacitive sensing.

Additional features further supported by CAPSENSE, and the low-power 1.71 V to 5.5 V operation, include:

• Deep sleep mode with 6 µA for “Always-On” touch sensing, as well as a hardware-based wake on touch detection operation in standby mode
• Autonomous channel scanning for available radio frequency channels that doesn’t require assistance from the MCU
• Active touch detection and tracking at an average of 200 µA
• Advanced proximity sensing with directivity with machine learning based algorithms
• Infineon-supplied software middleware for capacitive sensing design
• Automatic hardware tuning (SmartSense)

For serial communication, the PSoC 4000T MCU provides two independent runtime reconfigurable serial communication blocks (SCBs) with re-configurable I2C, SPI,

or UART functionality in one block with master/slave I2C functionality in the other. The MCU also provides up to 21 programmable GPIO pins for sensing or digital functionality, which include a 25-pin WLCSP (0.35 mm pitch), a 24-pin QFN (0.5 mm pitch), and a 16-pin QFN package (0.5 mm pitch).

Getting Started with Infineon Technologies’ PSoC 4000T MCU

The PSoC 4000T MCU is further supported by board support packages (BSPs), peripheral driver library (PDL), and aforementioned middleware, CAPSENSE. The solution supports the ModusToolbox software, additional multi-platform tools and software libraries, and industry-standard tool compatibility. Also, after configuration, development can be completed with Arm-based development tools.

For a closer look into the PSoC 400T MCU, check out the video below featured on Embedded Computing Design’s YouTube channel, where Vibheesh Bharathan, Principal Engineer at Infineon Technologies, runs through the compete feature set and provides some guidelines for designers.

Additional Resources:

• Product Page: https://www.infineon.com/cms/en/product/microcontroller/32-bit-psoc-arm
• Product Data Sheet: https://www.infineon.com/dgdl/Infineon-PSoC_4000T_MCU_datasheet