Atmel Touts maXTouch Touchscreen Technology

May 27, 2009 

Atmel touted a new fully integrated capacitive touchscreen technology - maXTouch - providing touchscreen performance which significantly exceeds today's leading edge solutions. Atmel's patented capacitive touch technology combined with an optimized and touch-sensing enabled AVR microcontroller provide unlimited touch capability, the fastest response times and the highest acquisition precision.

The general release of products based on the new maXTouch technology is scheduled for September 2009, and is already being demonstrated to major OEMs around the world. "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.

maXTouch represents the market's first fully integrated, unlimited touch, low power touchscreen solution. An unlimited number of unique touch points can be read and utilized through Atmel's advanced maXTouch algorithms. Advanced chip functions related to user gestures such as zoom, rotate, flick and tap are also recognized and reported. More complex functions are also derived from the on-chip shape recognition capabilities. Unintended touches are detected and rejected through the technology's unique ear/cheek/grip suppression algorithms.

The maXTouch technology provides excellent multiple touch finger adjacency for screen sizes surpassing 10". In addition, it enables extremely fast reporting of touch positions to the host, which means that there is no compromise in the user experience enabling advanced features such as handwriting recognition. The maXTouch technology also reports 'size of the touch' and 'width of line', and is the first capacitive technology based solution that recognizes stylus and finger nails as touch input.

The innovative maXTouch technology is based on a touch optimized version of Atmel's industry leading XMEGA AVR microcontroller CPU, coupled with a new advanced and fully-integrated analog sensing front-end to capture the charge image from the touchscreen sensor. Two on-chip dedicated DSP systems are used for the precise X-Y matrix position calculations. Atmel's patented Capacitive Charge Transfer technology provides the best possible signal-to-noise ratio and excellent linearity, and enables extremely robust performance even in noisy environments such as a mobile phone.

Atmel's first single-chip product utilizing the maXTouch technology is offered in an ultra-thin 5x5mm BGA package enabling customers to build the thinnest possible high-performance touchscreen products. The highly integrated maXTouch solution only requires 3 bypass capacitors to form the complete sensing solution, minimizing board space significantly compared with existing solutions which usually require in the range of 25 - 40 external components.

Touchscreens have become the user interface of choice for electronic devices and the market opportunity for capacitive touchscreen solutions is recognized as one of the fastest growing in the electronics industry. According to iSuppli, touchscreen shipments are projected to rise from approximately 300 million units in 2008 to well over 800 million units by 2013.

The maXTouch technology is focused directly on the heart of this market and is ideal for customers building touchscreen solutions across a broad range of end markets including mobile handsets, netbooks, printers, GPS, portable media players, digital cameras, and point of sale terminals.

Products based on the maXTouch technology are scheduled for general release in September 2009 and are currently available for demonstration and design-in purposes.