Atmel launches new family of maXTouch touch screen controller devices

Atmel has released its new maXTouch family of capacitive touchscreen controller devices with the capability of supporting unlimited number of unique simultaneous touches with a video-quality screen refresh rate of 250 Hz. maXTouch supports the development of touchscreens exceeding 10 inches with full zoom, rotate, handwriting and shape recognition functionalities. The specialty of this family of touch screen controllers are, they use Atmel's patented charge transfer technology which enhances the traditional mutual and self-capacitance solutions to achieve best performance compared other solutions in the industry.

The first release of this family coded mXT224 has 224 nodes and can completely redraw the screen once in 4 milli seconds. The mXT224 is suggested for advanced touch screen control solution with functionalities such as rejection of unintended touches, stretch/pinch and rotate gestures, handwriting and shape recognition (face detection on mobile phones, mobile Internet devices (MID) and netbook screens bigger than 10 inches).

MaXTouch reduces any use of additional components and is single chip solution. To achieve smaller interspatial distances on larger screens Multiple mXT224 touchscreen devices can be used.

"By 2013, worldwide demand for touch screen modules will exceed $6.4 billion, making touch interfaces the fastest growing segment in the displays industry. Multi-touch solutions are delivering significant advantages across a broad range of applications, and Atmel appears to have a compelling product for a very hot market. We'll definitely be watching as they roll it out," said Joe Abelson, Vice President, Displays Research, iSuppli Corporation.

Atmel claims, mXT224 is the first capacitive touchscreen solution supporting different types of touch objects such as finger touch, stylus, fingernails and gloves for drawing or signature capture and character recognition due to its 80:1 signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and extremely fast refresh rate. A high SNR enables precise reporting in noisy environments such as products with noise generated from radio transceivers, LCD displays and switching power supplies.
Atmel says, the nearest competing off-the-shelf touchscreen solution has half as many nodes as the mXT224, a screen refresh rate of only 83 Hz (66% slower) and an SNR of only 25:1 (66% less). In addition to offering the best SNR rates in the market, maXTouch offers advanced noise suppression algorithms to provide end products with the ultimate immunity against coupled noise issues.

"Since we announced the maXTouch technology in May of this year, many of the world's largest touchscreen customers are moving rapidly to adopt maXTouch products and take full advantage of the technology feature set in their next generation products," said Peter Jones, Managing Director of Atmel's Microcontroller Business Unit. "maXTouch provides capabilities and features not available in existing capacitive and resistive touchscreen technologies and expands the universe of user interface design possibilities".

Availability: Now
Price: Each $4.75 in 1M pieces
Package: 5x5mm BGA package