Patent 9739816 was granted and assigned to Analog Devices on August, 2017 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
The present disclosure describes a differential shield capacitive sensor design. The sensor design uses a differential measurement to measure capacitance and a pair of traces are used to differentially reject the response of the sensor traces and balance any parasitic capacitances. In some embodiments, the sensor design includes a differential sensor design on a bottom side of a flex circuit to differentially balance the environment and reject noise coupling to the sensor. The top side of the flex circuit can include a single ended design for proper environment sensing. The spatial arrangement and size of the sensors may vary depending on the application.