A parallel random walk solver for the capacitance calculation problem in touchscreen design

Abstract

In this paper, a random walk based solver is presented which calculates capacitances for verifying a touchscreen design. To suit the complicated conductor geometries in touchscreen structures, we extend the floating random walk (FRW) method for handling non-Manhattan conductors. A unified dielectric pre-characterization scheme is proposed to suit arbitrary dielectric profiles while keeping high accuracy. The algorithm is finally implemented on a computer cluster, which enables massively parallel computing. Numerical experiments validate the accuracy of the proposed techniques and the up to 67X parallel speedup. Compared with other schemes, the unified dielectric pre-characterization scheme exhibits the highest accuracy while costing the least in terms of memory usage.