New touch screens responding to touch gestures of tap, flick, zoom, and rotate

Atmel has made available a new capacitive touch sensor technology called maXTouch responding to natural touch gestures like zoom rotate tap and flick.

Addressing the market of Mobile Phones, Netbooks and other such Electronic Devices
Atmel's new maXTouch touch sensor technology based devices feature fastest response times and the precision sensing such as handwriting recognition.

The other specialties of this capacitance touchsense technology are,
1. There is no limit on the number of touch points on the touch screen providing multiple touch finger      adjacencies on screen sizes larger than 10 inches.
2. Any casual touch not meant for any purpose are detected and rejected by using interesting process     algorithms called ear/check/grip suppression algorithms.
3. Precision touch parameters "Size of the touch" and "width of line" are passed on to the host     processor to enable stylus and finger nails to be used as touch input elements.

maXTouch technology based devices are made up of Atmel's XMEGA AVR microcontroller CPU, and a analog sensing front-end circuit/device to capture the charge image from the touchscreen sensor. Two on-chip dedicated DSP systems are used for calculating precise X-Y matrix positions.

The first single-chip product based on maXTouch technology is offered in a thin 5x5mm BGA package. maXTouch solution requires less external passive components of only 3 bypass capacitors to form the complete sensing solution.

"The initial reception of those customers who are already designing with the maXTouch technology exceeds our highest expectations," said Vegard Wollan, Managing Director and General Manager of Atmel's Microcontroller Business Unit. "Many of our mobile handset customers have commented that maXTouch clearly provides better performance than any touchscreen phone in the market today and is superior compared to products and technologies currently being offered by other suppliers. In addition, it provides the lowest power consumption and a solution with a significantly smaller form factor than the existing solutions," concluded Vegard Wollan.

The trend in the electronics industry is to throw all the mechanical switch based input controls out into a junkyard and replacing them with a reliable touch sensor control. Due to multiple benefits of touch sensor tech, its one of the fastest growing technologies in electronics industry. Market researcher iSuppli has predicted, touchscreen shipments are projected to rise from approximately 300 million units in 2008 to well over 800 million units by 2013.

The products suggested for this technology includes broad range of products such as mobile handsets, netbooks, printers, GPS, portable media players, digital cameras, and point of sale terminals.

Availability: Now in sample quantities, general volume release in September 2009.

For more details visit www.atmel.com