• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.47 no.2
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• pp.68-76
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• 2010

Touch-enabled technology is increasingly being accepted as a main communication interface between human and computers. However, conventional touchscreen technologies, such as resistive overlay, capacitive overlay, and SAW(Surface Acoustic Wave), are not cost-effective for large screens. As an alternative to the conventional methods, we introduce a newly emerging method, an optical imaging touchscreen which is much simpler and more cost-effective. Despite its attractive benefits, optical imaging touchscreen has to overcome some problems, such as heavy computational complexity, intermittent ghost points, and over-sensitivity, to be commercially used. Therefore, we designed a hardware controller for signal processing and multi-coordinate computation, and proposed Infrared-blocked DA(Dark Area) manipulation as a solution. While the entire optical touch control took 34ms with a 32-bit microprocessor, the designed hardware controller can manage 2 valid coordinates at 200fps and also reduce energy consumption of infrared diodes from 1.8Wh to 0.0072Wh.