Renesas Electronics offers simple, low-cost solutions for testing liquid and solid materials

     Renesas Electronics Corporation announced the launch of its material inspection solution. The solution makes it easy and cost-effective to detect materials or liquids without sensors by connecting electrodes using Renesas Electronics RX130 capacitive touch key microcontrollers (MCUS). Replacing sensors with electrodes in this way reduces bill of material (BOM) costs and enables multi-point inspection with a single chip, enabling manufacturers of industrial equipment, office automation equipment and home appliances to explore and develop inspection systems for cost-sensitive applications.

     Renesas Electronic Touch Key MCUS feature capacitive touch sensor units specifically designed for capacitance measurement with extremely high sensitivity and high noise resistance, enabling material inspection solutions to easily detect the presence or absence of powders (such as dust in vacuum cleaners), liquids (such as liquids in refrigerators and coffee makers) or materials (such as paper) by measuring the capacitance between the MCU electrodes. The increase or decrease of powder, liquid, or material changes the capacitance value between the electrodes.

     Shigeki Kato, Vice President, Enterprise Infrastructure Business Unit, Renesas Electronics Industrial Solutions, said, "Sensor systems are an important part of our customers' application development efforts, and we are excited to offer capacitive touch solutions with different capabilities to support new applications. With our new capacitive touch inspection system, customers can expand their sensing capabilities while reducing BOM costs and improving inspection accuracy."

     With the proliferation of sensor-based technologies in industrial equipment, office automation equipment, and home appliances, the demand for different types of sensor solutions is also rapidly increasing to meet multiple sensing functions. Application scenarios require fine-grained perception to enable predictive maintenance capabilities. For example, the printer needs to detect the remaining amount of consumed material and notify the user in advance when it needs to be replaced; The vacuum cleaner manages the residual dust that collects in the filter for effective cleaning. These features optimize the functionality of the device and increase user convenience.

     Although these applications can be achieved by adopting various types of sensors, such as pressure sensors, photoelectric sensors, IR sensors, and CMOS sensors for detecting physical objects, the use of multiple sensors creates additional costs and burdens on development.