Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Electrical and Electronics Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

PDF

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

2014

Optical Position Sensor

Articles 1 - 1 of 1

Full-Text Articles in Electrical and Electronics

Development Of A One-Dimensional Position Sensitive Detector For Tracking Applications, Leigh Kent Lydecker Jan 2014

Development Of A One-Dimensional Position Sensitive Detector For Tracking Applications, Leigh Kent Lydecker

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Optical Position Sensitive Detectors (PSDs) are a non-contact method of tracking the location of a light spot. Silicon-based versions of such sensors are fabricated with standard CMOS processing, are inexpensive and provide a real-time, analog signal output corresponding to the position of the light spot. Because they are non-contact, they do not degrade over time from surface friction due to repetitive sliding motion associated with standard full contact sliding potentiometers. This results in long, reliable device lifetimes. In this work, an innovative PSD was developed to replace the linear hard contact potentiometer currently being used in a human-computer interface architecture.