Equivalent optically transparent circuits: an optimization-driven methodology for the design of optically transparent sensors and antennas

触摸传感器是智能手机、平板电脑和可穿戴健康监测仪等个人电子设备用户界面不可或缺的组件。这些传感器是普通的电路，其通常的铜线被光学透明（几乎不可见）的导体所取代，如氧化铟锡（ITO）。与铜相比，光学透明导体具有更高的损耗，使用光学透明导体使得这些电路的设计成为一项具有挑战性的任务。电路设计人员基本上是在试错的基础上应对这一挑战的，他们使用电路模型和电磁仿真的组合来推导出以性能换取光学透明度的拓扑结构。随着个人和可穿戴电子设备市场的竞争一如既往，新的触摸传感器预计将支持低延迟的多任务手势的高速率感测。这些更严格的规范测试了当前设计工具的极限，激发了对透明电路的最佳性能界限以及在给定制造约束下满足这些界限的拓扑结构的进一步研究。

Touch sensors are indispensable components of the user interface of personal electronic devices such as smartphones, tablet computers and wearable health monitors. These sensors are ordinary circuits, whose usual copper wires are replaced by optically transparent (practically invisible) conductors such as Indium Tin Oxide (ITO). The use of optically transparent conductors, which suffer from higher losses compared to copper, makes the design of these circuits a challenging task. Circuit designers have by and large dealt with this challenge on a trial-and-error basis, using a combination of circuit models and electromagnetic simulations to derive topologies that trade performance for optical transparency. With the market for personal and wearable electronic devices as competitive as ever, new touch sensors are expected to support high-rate sensing of multi-tasking gestures with low latency. These stricter specifications test the limits of current design tools, motivating further research on the optimal performance bounds of transparent circuits and the topologies that meet those bounds under given fabrication constraints.