This thesis is involved with the investigation, implementation, verification, validation and optimization of a purpose built on-chip solution customized for a real world touch screen application. A Field Programmable Gate Array based application specific controller has been designed and built in this research as a substitute for a general purpose controller to explore the feasibility and capability of meeting the required system performance while maintaining the minimum consumption of system resources. A variety of new mechanisms, approaches and techniques have been evaluated, developed and applied to different design stages at multiple levels to achieve an overall optimized system outcome.

A dedicated optical imaging acquisition system has been developed with a concurrent control mechanism, faster operational speed and lower signal noise; a customized touch information processing unit has been designed to perform edge detection, object positioning, and touch motion indication with low system latency and highly parallelism; and a computer interface has been built to demonstrate the coherent real-time system performance with visualized validation of results. In the optical based touch screen area, this research presents an original and compact on-chip solution with a significant number of algorithm and method improvements in terms of the touch object detection and localization efficiency as well as touch motion analyzing capability.

The system design has been optimized after establishing the desired functionality to minimize logic resource and memory storage consumption, based on a wide range of techniques with a certain amount of architectural restructuring. The overall economic on-chip resource consumption has been achieved in this research with further consideration for migrating the design into a more application specific high integration density chip in the future for large volume manufacture.