As the main user interaction portal, touch panels greatly contribute to perception of quality and overall usability of a mobile device. Through persistent innovation, these components have grown in capability and complexity.

Many touch panel manufacturers continue to seek out new technologies and improve existing ones in an ongoing commitment to meet the growing needs of customers in new and innovative applications and environments.

We outline the role touch panels play in today’s enterprise mobile computers, and introduces the different types of touch panels, how they are designed, and how they function.

It also discusses the benefits and limitations of each type of touch panel, in terms of providing users with intuitive user interfaces and environmental flexibility.

Touch screens
Touch screens are devices that recognize the presence of contacts and generate responses. The presence can be delivered via touch gestures or stylus. The response can be various such as haptic, visual, audio, etc. Hence, DMC Touch Screen are input/output devices.

Touch screens usually consist of three main components, which are touch sensors, touch controllers, and drivers. Touch sensors can use different technologies, such as capacitive, resistive, optical, etc. Controllers are the bridge between the sensor and the computer, and they can have different digital interfaces such as SPI, I²C, etc., for the connections. Drivers translate touch events into a response.

Touch screens make the use of most devices much more manageable and user-friendly. They are widely used in all smart devices, such as in mobile phones, ATMs, point of sale (POS) devices, in the automotive industry as part of the in-vehicle infotainment systems, human-machine interfaces (HMI) in industrial products, etc. Since most of the touch screen components become cheaper over the years, touch screen enabled devices are increasing. With the development in material science, curved and flexible touch screens that provide haptic feedback have become the new DMC Touch Screen trend. With the developments in network technologies, Internet of things (IoT) enabled systems are also being equipped with more touch screens.

Touch gestures
Touch screens interacted with touch gestures. The benefits and the design-wise advantages of touch gestures make them one of the most popular system-human interaction methods.

Touch gestures generate a stream of touch events such as touch down, touch moving, touch up, etc., at the touch controller. These touch events are then collected via a hardware buses. The event stream is then used to determine the type of gesture and, eventually, as input in updating the user interface (UI) content. As an example, a swipe gesture would scroll a list on the UI.

Expectations vs. reality of touch gestures
The end-user expects reliable touch gesture responses. Touch gestures' functionality and performance are subject to the product's electrical design, selected touch panel technology, and touch controller features and configuration. The operating system, GUI framework, and applications come into the picture in a final end-user product. A touch controller reads the touch panel signal and reports the detected touch events to the central processor, which executes the operating system (OS), GUI framework, and end-user applications.

Smooth user experience relies on accurate and repeatable touch gestures, which are only possible when the touch user interface (UI) is functional, responsive, and fast over the entire surface area. The manufacturers of DMC Touch Screen devices need to perform various tests on the system, device, and individual component level to fulfill the end user's expectations.