Programmable system on chip based capacitive sensor design

Embedded systems are specific purpose computers, operating devices in which they are. These devices need to be extremely reliable and safe therefore error rate of the embedded system should be very low. Operating environment of the devices includes a number of factors unsuitable for electronic systems such as weather conditions, signal noise, electromagnetic interference. Designers have to take precautions against all these factors by determining in advance. Also system resources almost are limited in all of the embedded application. It is required that designer use processor power and memory very carefully and keep power consumption at a minimum level. There are many types of microcontrollers and they are developing day by day. Nowadays, PSoC (Programmable System on Chip), whose usage rapidly spreads, has an important role in embedded systems. PSoC, developed by Cypress, is designed to target 8-bit microcontroller applications and offers analog and digital blocks, whose function can be easily identified by user, together with M8C 8-bit CPU basic block. Today, there are different types of PSoC. In the market, PSoC 1 (8-bit M8C core - 24 MHz), PSoC 3 (Single-Cycle 8051 core - 67 MHz), PSoC 5 (32-bit ARM® Cortex ™ M3 CPU - 84 MHz) and PSoC 4 (32-bit ARM® Cortex ™ M0 - 48 MHz), new member of series, are available. In this thesis, capacitive sensing technology is examined by using PSoC 4 microcontroller and various applications, based PSoC, are performed.