What is a thin-film keyboard?

Thin-Film keyboard with low cost, simple process and good feel and other advantages occupy the vast majority of the market, the daily use of the keyboard are all the basic membrane keyboard, thin-film keyboard structure is very simple, you can directly contact the keyboard upper and lower caps, key caps, you can see the button under the silicone cap, film circuit and circuit board.

By looking at the film circuit, it can be found that it is composed of upper, middle and lower three layers, the upper and lower two layers of the use of conductive paint printed circuit, under the keys are equipped with the corresponding contacts, the middle layer for the isolation layer, in the key part of the same with a circular contact (or knockout), in the key cap, to achieve up and down the two-layer circuit of the unicom, produce a corresponding signal.

Because the film-type keyboard is the "key + film" The basic structure, so the keyboard feel, characteristics, and so much depends on the design of the key.

The key of the film keyboard can be divided into crater and scissors foot (x structure) Two kinds of structure, the crater structure is the most commonly used design of the keyboard, it is the key to insert the keyboard interface, the bottom directly with the silicone cap contact, in the feel of the bond column length and silicone cap elasticity, the crater structure of the keys are used high key caps, Long-key design, so that you can get a good sense of feedback, and the problem is that the corresponding fuselage to do thicker, and the stability of the key is slightly worse, prone to shaking, click can not get a very consistent feel.

Unlike the crater structure, the scissors foot structure is from four corners of the button to support, so its keys more stable, uniform force, although the key to shorten the corresponding, but in the hand is still good, and mute effect better. Scissors foot structure has a keypad low, occupy less space, the strength of uniform and so on, but because the structure is more complex, the cost is slightly higher, so the earliest is only used in notebook computers, in recent years only in desktop keyboard applications.