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IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 12, NO. 5, MAY 2012

Capacitive Pressure Sensing Based Key in PCB

Technology for Industrial Applications

Ljubomir Vra ar, Member, IEEE, Aneta Prijic, Member, IEEE, Du an Vu kovic, Student Member, IEEE, and
c
s
c

Zoran Prijic, Member, IEEE

AbstractThis paper reports the design and manufacturing of

a device suitable for use in command panels of industrial equipment in the place of mechanical buttons and switches. The device
consists of a capacitive pressure sensor, low-cost microcontroller,
current driver, and state indication LEDs. All components are embedded into multilayer printed circuit board using standard manufacturing steps. The device has user-programmable properties and
it can behave either as a key or as a switch. An interconnection feature is provided in a sense that multiple devices can be organized
into an array thus forming a keyboard. A simple two-wire communication interface for controlling the keyboard is described.
Index TermsCapacitive-pressure sensor, keyboard, PCB technology, two-wire communication.

I. INTRODUCTION
EVELOPMENT of versatile human interfaces for various
electronic devices has attracted much attention in recent
years [1]. Although efforts are mainly directed towards consumer devices, there are requirements from industrial, medical
and other more specialized electronic branches. Manufacturers
of such equipment are looking for a substitution of mechanical
push buttons and switches used in command panels with more
sophisticated and customizable components.
Capacitive sensors, either touch or pressure, are found to be a
good alternative to mechanical devices, mainly due to their implementation exibility, reliability and overall durability. These
sensors are used in conjunction with microcontrollers to provide
accurate detection of the change in capacitance due to a touch or
a pressure of a human nger. Touch sensors have limited usage
in the industrial environment due to their susceptibility to false
readings induced by humidity and inability to implement a single
conductive touching surface over several devices. Pressure sensors are more appropriate for the implementation in the equipment designed for harsh working conditions. For the pressure
range of interest these sensors are designed as MEMS devices
usually using fabrication processes from the printed circuit board

Manuscript received September 05, 2011; accepted October 09, 2011. Date
of publication October 25, 2011; date of current version April 13, 2012. This
work was supported in part by the Serbian Ministry of Education and Science
under Grant TR32026 and in part by Ei PCB Factory, Ni. The associate editor
s
coordinating the review of this paper and approving it for publication was Prof.
Kiseon Kim.

s
Lj. Vra ar, A. Prijic and Z. Prijic are with the University of Ni, Facc
ulty of Electronic Engineering, 18000 Ni, Serbia (e-mail: ljubomir.
s
vracar@elfak.ni.ac.rs; aneta.prijic@elfak.ni.ac.rs; zoran.prijic@elfak.ni.ac.rs).

D. Vu kovic is with DELTAIdemoLAB, 2970 Hrsholm, Denmark (e-mail:

c
duv@delta.dk).
Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identier 10.1109/JSEN.2011.2173483

Fig. 1. Isometric view and crosssection of the capacitive pressure sensor (onequarter shown due to the symmetry of the structure; not to scale).

(PCB) technology [2][4], while for different applications other

techniques have been reported [5][10]. Many details of sensors
design and usage are also given in the documents issued by several major semiconductor device manufacturers [11][16].
The objective of this paper is to present a composite device
which consists of the capacitive pressure sensor, microcontroller
and the peripherals, and can act either as a key or as a switch.
The device is realized in a conventional PCB technology and
it has properties customizable by the user. The sensor design
with double layered dielectric and a self-calibrating procedure
to improve sensitivity and reliability of the device are proposed.
Apart from the standalone use, an interconnection capability is
introduced to make the devices suitable for organizing into an
array which behaves like a keyboard. Its exible conguration,
compact design and the ability to be used with gloves make the
device suitable for the command panels in industrial equipment.
In the following sections, the capacitive pressure sensor design is presented, and the device construction is described in detail. The application interface and the communication between
devices and controller logic, including protocol details, are also
presented and discussed.
II. PRESSURE SENSOR
The device is designed using a square-shaped geometry suitable for production in conventional PCB technology. The pressure sensor is a circular parallel plate capacitor occupying a part
of the device volume, as shown in Fig. 1. On the square shaped

1530-437X/$26.00 2011 IEEE


VRACAR et al.: CAPACITIVE PRESSURE SENSING BASED KEY IN PCB TECHNOLOGY FOR INDUSTRIAL APPLICATIONS

TABLE I
DIMENSIONS OF THE STRUCTURE FROM FIG. 1

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TABLE II
MECHANICAL AND ELECTRICAL PARAMETERS OF THE
MATERIALS USED FOR THE SIMULATION

Fig. 2. Illustration of the working principle of the capacitive pressure sensor.

core, made of the Flame Retardant Class 4 (FR4) woven glass

reinforced epoxy resin, the bottom Cu electrode of a circular
geometry is printed. The top electrode is realized as Cu layer
on the bottom side of the top square FR4 layer, which seals the
element. An appropriately shaped spacer, also from FR4, separates core and top layer and forms cylindrical cavity partially
lled with solid dielectric (in this case prepreg). The actual dimensions of the structure from Fig. 1 are listed in Table I.
Elasticity of FR4 material enables the top layer to deect
under pressure applied to its surface at the area above the cavity,
as illustrated in Fig. 2. In this way the top electrode is pushed
toward the bottom one and the capacitance of the sensor is
changed. The capacitance of the sensor should be as high as
possible in order to minimize inuence of parasitic capacitances
due to the rest of the device structure. Therefore, larger area of
the bottom electrode, thinner spacer and higher permittivity of
the dielectric between the electrodes are preferable. Diameter
of the bottom electrode and the spacer thickness are determined on the basis of the overall device dimensions and by
the limits of the used PCB technology. Apart from the design
described in [12], dielectric between the electrodes is double
layered consisting of the thin prepreg and air, thus forming
two capacitors in series [17]. The capacitor with prepreg has
a constant capacitance, whereas another capacitance is determined by the air gap between the top electrode and the surface
of the prepreg. In this way the relative change of the equivalent
capacitance is increased as the air gap thickness is decreased.
As a result, sensitivity of the element is considerably improved
for the larger pressures comparing to the sensor with the same
geometry having only one dielectric. Also, existence of the
solid dielectric layer make it impossible for the top and bottom
electrodes to be shortened and it maintains the sensors operability even when the top layer is considerably damaged. Note
that, apart from the reported designs involving other polymers
[2], [10], in this construction only FR4 is used.
Mechanical properties and sensitivity of the capacitive pressure sensor from Fig. 1 are analyzed by numerical simulation in

Fig. 3. (left) Total deformation and (right) equivalent stress values in the sensor
under applied pressure of 115 kPa.

ANSYS 12 Workbench and APDL Software [18]. Relevant mechanical and electrical properties of the materials used for the
simulation are given in Table II. Simulation geometry was simplied in comparison to the actual one (see Section III) by assuming that the core extends up to the bottom of the device. Mechanical constrains were set by xing support at the bottom side
of the structure and by setting the symmetry boundary condition
onto the vertically halving plane. Loads are dened by applying
pressure up to 115 kPa onto the circular pressing area at the top
surface of the top layer. This area is assumed to have a diameter of an average human ngerpad (1.2 cm) [19]. A mesh for
structural analysis was the one primarily generated by ANSYS
Mechanical Workbench with subsequent renement of the elements on the top surface of the top layer. Simulation results of
the total deformation and equivalent stress values in the sensor
under applied pressure of 115 kPa are shown in Fig. 3. In this
case the top layer is deected to the limit when the top electrode touches the surface of the prepreg. The maximum equivalent stress in the layer has the value of 43.9 MPa at the center
of the pressing area. This value is well below the yield strength
of FR4 material (Table II) and reliable mechanical properties of
the sensing element should be expected.
The capacitance of the sensor for different pressure values is
determined through CMATRIX macro of ANSYS APDL software by implementing SOLID123 type of 3D tetrahedral electrostatic elements. It was assumed that Cu electrodes are isolated
conducting surfaces onto the FR4 dielectric areas. A nonuniform, free meshing strategy with an initial smart sizing option

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IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 12, NO. 5, MAY 2012

Fig. 4. Simulated relative change of the sensor capacitance versus applied

pressure.

Fig. 5. Functional block diagram of a single key device.

was used for mesh generation of the solid model. The subsequent renement of the volume elements was conducted to obtain solution independence on the mesh density. Electrostatic
constrains set the bottom electrode at the high potential and the
top electrode grounded. Also, the bottom surface of the core was
grounded as a part of the shield used to improve noise immunity
in the real sensor.
The capacitance formed by the bottom electrode and the
shield is connected in parallel with the sensing capacitance.
Therefore, as being builtin and constant, its value of 4.23 pF
contributes to the total simulated capacitance. The relative
change of the sensor capacitance is dened as:
(1)

Fig. 6. Exploded cross section of a single key device (not to scale).

where
is the capacitance in the pressed and
in the unpressed state. Simulation results for
as a function of the applied pressure are given in Fig. 4, for single and double layered
is increased by the introduction
dielectrics. It is evident that
of a double layered dielectric. It should be emphasized that for
the case of a single layered dielectric relative change of the capacitance does not depend on its permittivity. Simulated values
of the total sensor capacitance are in the range 8.6 12.7 pF.
However, since the sensor is embedded in the much complex
structure, correlation between the simulation and experiment is
performed on a fabricated device, as described in Section III.
III. DEVICE DESCRIPTION
Functional block diagram of a single key device incorporating
described pressure sensor is shown in Fig. 5. The blocks are
arranged using conventional multilayer PCB technology with
embedded electronic components, as shown in Fig. 6. The components are laid out in a manner that enhances noise immunity
[20]. Note that the bottom side of the top layer and the top side
of the bottom layer are used as ground planes.
Voltage changes caused by pressing the sensor are acquired
by a 10bit ADC converter of a lowcost PIC12F683 microcontroller [21] using a Capacitive Voltage Divider (CVD) principle
described in [22] and the corresponding hardware and software
guidelines [23]. In essence, changes of the ADC readings are
inversely proportional to the changes of the sensor capacitance.

Fig. 7. Waveforms measured on a voltage divider showing voltage change

due to the pressure applied on the sensor. ADC readings start when the
microcontroller opens an internal switch to measure voltage on its sample and
hold capacitor.

Waveforms captured on a voltage divider are shown in Fig. 7.

Threshold values of the ADC readings, which dene pressed
and released states of the key (Fig. 9), are set utilizing a Slew
Rate Limiter lter [24]. Waveforms illustrating the behaviour
of the whole device are shown in Fig. 8. Output delay time is


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Fig. 8. Waveforms measured on the device: the upper waveform shows ADC
readings on the voltage divider; the lower waveform shows output from the device. Crosshairs (a) and (b) mark the moments when the sensor is pressed and
output is produced, respectively, thus dening output delay time.

Fig. 10. Photograph and the pinout of a fabricated single key device (side
length 35 mm).

Fig. 9. Threshold values adjustment used to compensate the effect of a continuous pressure.

dependent on the lter adjustments [24], and debounce time

which can be prolonged as a customizable parameter. Reliable
operation of the device is achieved by using the minimal value
of 50 ms.
Moreover, an additional functional problem is particularly
handled. If a high pressure is applied on the key either for a
long time (e.g., using some object as a load rather than a nger)
or by a hit, slowly reversible or permanent deformation of the
top layer may occur. When the load is released, the key may behave as still being pressed. A software watchdog timer which
monitors duration of the applied pressure is introduced. When
the monitored value reaches the predened timeout (10 s in
this case), the key is set to the released state and the threshold
values are set below the current ADC readings, as illustrated
in Fig. 9. Therefore, the key will be activated again only if a
higher pressure is applied. If the top layers deformation fully
recovers after the pressure has been removed, Slew Rate Limiter
will set the thresholds to their initial values. The described readjustment of the threshold values may be qualied as a selfcalibrating feature. The device also has an ability to detect its state
on powerup. This is achieved by saving the reading of an unpressed state into microcontrollers EEPROM during regular

operation of the device. Then, within the startup sequence, the

saved value is compared to the current reading so the device can
decide whether or not it is being pressed (i.e., held) during the
powerup.
The device is designed to be used either in a single key
(standalone) mode or in an array (keyboard) mode. When in the
pin (Fig. 5) is short-circuited
single key mode,
and
pin is used to
to the supply voltage
provide high, low or high impedance state to the host applicapin may be short-circuited to
tion. Optionally,
the gate of the builtin MOSFET to extend the output current
capability of the device up to 0.5 A. Opendrain conguration
of the MOSFET is for driving relays which is often required
in industrial equipment. In a keyboard mode these pins are
used to receive clock and send/receive data, as described in
Section IV. The LED out pin should be short-circuited to the
LED in pin to control state indication LEDs. Optionally, this
pin may be connected to the other type of indication control. In
order to achieve interconnection accessibility, pins are arranged
on all four sides of the device [25], as shown in Fig. 10. The
connection pads are realized to accommodate standard one-row
headers having 2.54 mm pitch spacing. When the headers are
soldered, the device can be inserted into a main command panel
board like any other throughhole component. The connection
examples are given in Section IV.
Sensitivity of a single key device from Fig. 10 is experimentally determined using force transducer as a load and recording
corresponding ADC readings. The obtained results are shown
in Fig. 11 and compared to the simulation. The measured values
are averaged for randomly selected devices from various PCB
panels to obtain a typical curve. Normalized ADC readings are
calculated as:
(2)

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IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 12, NO. 5, MAY 2012

Fig. 13. Top and side view of the prototype command panel for the torch control in an industrial process.
Fig. 11. Normalized ADC readings vs. applied pressure for a single key device.
ADC refers to the reading in the unpressed state.

metal with the nonconductive foil attached beneath, as shown

in Fig. 13. It should be pointed out that any possible tension
effect caused by the mask xture on the keys is compensated by
their selfcalibrating feature. In order to ensure waterproong,
the top pin headers can be sealed using epoxy resin.
Reliability of the device was successfully tested up to
activations with 2 s period using pressure of 30 kPa as twice the
value assumed to be most commonly used in practice.
IV. APPLICATION INTERFACE

Fig. 12. Photographs of a fabricated device: (a) top layertop view; (b) bottom
layerbottom view; (c) corebottom view; (d) bottom layertop view; (side
length 25 mm).

where
is the reading in the unpressed state,
sample and hold capacitance of the AD converter and
is the capacitance of the microcontrollers input pin to
which the sensor is connected. A fairly good agreement is found
between the simulated and measured values, whereas the discrepancies are due to the simplied simulation geometry and
technology tolerances.
On the basis of the presented simulating technique, a parameterdriven modelling is employed to design a device with
smaller lateral dimensions by keeping the same sensitivity. The
photographs of the realized device, including the inner layers
depicted in Fig. 6, are shown in Fig. 12. The smaller devices
might be more convenient for a keyboard arrangement, whereas
the larger ones are for a standalone use, especially for operators
wearing industrial gloves.
A decorative and protective fascia of a users choice should
be mounted over the top of the keys. It can be made even of

The described device can be customized in terms of adjustment of its behaviour and properties. This is accomplished by
using the custom controller board and hardware interface shown
in Fig. 14. The controller board consists of the microcontroller
(PIC18F4520 in this case), common interfaces for the connection with the host application, and the two wire interface for
the communication with attached devices. Each device can be
congured to act either as a standalone or as a part of a keyboard using the same controller board. For devices intended to
be used as standalone, the controller board is needed only for
the conguration of their properties and not for the application
implementation, as illustrated in Fig. 15.
Communication between the controller board and the devices
is designed as a serialbased, using clock and data lines. The
clock line is driven by the controller. The data line is bidirectional, so it can be used for sending and receiving data. In the
idle state the clock line is at the low level and the data line is at
the high level via a pullup resistor to the supply voltage. Byte
transfer resembles SPI 0 mode with an additional clock pulse
at the end of the transmission to release the data line. It should
be noted that neither the controller nor any of the attached devices actually pulls the data line to the high level, instead the
high impedance state is used on their data pins. During the initial phase of communication, where the controller board sends
the packet, all devices in the array receive the packet. After receiving the packet all devices set the data line to low level and
as every single one nishes with processing the packet it sets its
data line pin to high impedance. In this way the data line is going
to return to high level only when all devices have nished with
processing the data. When such an event occurs, the controller
board initiates reading of the rst byte of the reply. Depending
on the value of the received byte, which can vary from the error


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Fig. 14. Block diagram of the controller board and connection interface for an
array conguration. In the inset, a photograph of the controller board is shown
(dimensions are 25 mm 40 mm).

code to a beginning of the conguration readout from the device,

the controller board nishes the communication or continues to
receive additional bytes from the device that has sent the reply.
A developed communication protocol consists of a set of
commands with the following syntax:
Fig. 15. Examples of the keys arrangement in an application environment:
(a) standalone mode, (b) keyboard mode. Black jumpers indicate shortcircuited
pads.

where
is a byte containing the command identiis a byte containing the number of bytes to
cation,
follow,
is a byte containing the particular devices
are up to 7 bytes containing conguraaddress, and
tion parameters. An address is required for the device operating
in the keyboard mode and may take value from 1 to 127. The
addressing procedure starts when the controller issues a command to set an address and as a part of the command it sends
the desired address value. All keys in the keyboard receive the
command and get into the addressing mode. While in the addressing mode, every pressed key will assign to itself the address it has received. The keys remain in the addressing mode
until the command for ending the address procedure has been issued by the controller. Note that it is possible to assign the same
address to multiple keys, e.g., in the case when the same key
role is required in different places on the keyboard. Although
the designed address space allows up to 127 keys, in order to
maintain signal integrity practical usage should be restricted to
a few tenths of keys.

Once the keyboard has been congured, the role of the controller is to decode the address of a pressed key and to pass it to
the host application. When a key is pressed it signals its state to
the controller by pulling the data line low. The controller then
starts to acquire the address of a pressed key by using the search
procedure according to the owchart given in Fig. 16. The procedure is designed to speed up an overall keyboard response and
it has been inspired by the search method used in 1Wire devices
[26], [27]. The address required is obtained in 10 ms. Note that
without using the described procedure search time would be orders of magnitude longer (depending on the number of keys),
which would result in severe degradation of keyboard responsiveness. Communication protocol and the search procedure can
also be built in the host application, thus eliminating the need for
the controller board.
A PCbased utility with a graphical user interface is developed to simplify the conguration of the devices. When the con-

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IEEE SENSORS JOURNAL, VOL. 12, NO. 5, MAY 2012

cancel the effect of undesirable working conditions was developed. An allside input/output design was proposed as a way
for convenient interconnection between the devices. The ability
of the device to be congured either as a single key or within
a keyboard was demonstrated. A simple and reliable twowire
communication protocol between the controller board and the
devices arranged in a keyboard was developed.
Although the device is designed to be used in industrial equipment, its robustness and exibility make it suitable for other applications like those in medical equipment, home appliances,
etc. Because its design is based on a widely available technology
and comprises lowcost electronic components it is also appropriate for a volume production.
REFERENCES

Fig. 16. Flowchart of the address search procedure (Unied Modeling Language notation used).

troller board is connected to PC using USB interface (Fig. 14),

the following device properties are congurable:
function (key or switch)
retainability of the previous state on startup, if the device
is congured as a switch
on/off LED state indication (red, green or none)
on/off output state (high, low or high impedance), if the
device is congured as a single key
press threshold
prolonged input (how long the device should be pressed
before activation)
prolonged output (how long the device should stay active
after it has been pressed)
address, if the device is congured in a keyboard mode.
The conguration parameters are nonvolatile. Multiple devices
can be congured at once with the same parameters by using
reserved address value of 255 in the conguration command.
V. CONCLUSION
The new pressure sensingbased device was developed and
realized in PCB technology. The pressure sensor using double
dielectric for improved sensitivity and reliability has been designed, simulated and experimentally veried. The builtin microcontroller was used not only to acquire sensors data but also
to drive integrated peripherals. A selfcalibrating technique to

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[20] T. Perme, Layout and physical design guidelines for capacitive

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Ljubomir Vra ar (M99) received the B.S. and M.S.

c
degrees in electrical engineering from the University
of Ni, Ni, Serbia, in 1999 and 2009, respectively.
s
s
He has been a member of the Academic Staff
with the Department of Microelectronics, Faculty
of Electronic Engineering, University of Ni, since
s
2002. He gained his vast pedagogical experience
by performing a large number of lab experiments
during his studies and was engaged in development
and modernization of teaching material. From
20012007, he was the head of the Applied Physics
and Electronics Department, Petnica Science Centre , Valjevo, Serbia. During
this time, he worked on establishing international cooperation with the Weizman
Institute of Science in Israel in the eld of communications and education of
young talents. He has authored or coauthored over 30 papers published in the
national and international journals and conference proceedings, and is currently
working on embedded controller systems and smart sensors design, especially
in eld of home automation and energy harvesting.

1503

Aneta Prijic (M91) received the B.S., M.S. and

Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the
University of Ni, Ni, Serbia, in 1993, 1996 and
s
s
2007, respectively.
She has been a member of the Academic Staff
with the Faculty of Electronic Engineering, Department of Microelectronics, University of Ni,
s
since 1995. She has authored or coauthored over 30
papers published in the international journals and
conference proceedings. Her main research areas are
modelling and simulation of electrical and electronic
devices, micro-electromechanical and energy harvesting systems.

Duan Vu kovic (M05) received the M.S. degree

s
c
in electrical engineering from the University of Ni,
s
Ni, Serbia, in 2009. He is currently working toward
s
the Ph.D. degree at the Danish Technical University
(DTU), Lyngby, Denmark.
He is employed as a Specialist at a test and
consultancy company DELTA, Hrsholm, Denmark.
His research interests are in the areas of embedded
systems, energy harvesting, wireless sensor networks
and power management.

Zoran Prijic (M91) received the B.S., M.S. and

Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from the
University of Ni, Ni, Serbia, in 1987, 1990, and
s
s
1993, respectively.
He joined Ei-Microelectronics, Ni, in 1987,
s
working initially on CMOS integrated circuits
and then on power MOS transistors technology
development. In 1990, he joined the Academic Staff,
Faculty of Electronic Engineering, University of
Ni, where he is currently Head of the Department
s
of Microelectronics. He was Head of the Laboratory
for Microelectronics and Head of the Computer Center. From 2001 to 2006, he
was a Research and Development Vice-President of Ei Holding Co, Ni. He has
s
authored or coauthored over 50 papers in the international technical literature.
His area of research is modelling and simulation of electronic components
and micro-electromechanical systems, while his technical interest includes
industrial informatics.