1.2 The Designer's Dilemma

Because getting the best performance possible sometimes involves giving up some robustness, and it is very difficult (if not impossible) to predict or test all of the ways an end user will use a product, the capacitive touch designer is often left with critical decisions that need to be made to satisfy all of the competing design objectives (functional, integration, financial, reliability, and robustness). Ultimately, the balance between performance and robustness varies by the type of product and the market into which it is sold.

To aid the designer in effectively balancing these two critical trade offs, this document presents a set of useful terms to make reliability and robustness easier to understand. Furthermore, this document also provides a procedure for assessing the reliability and robustness of a capacitive touch application using CapTIvate technology.