Atmel releases touchscreen controller ICs

Atmel has announced a line of charge-transfer, capacitive touchscreen controller ICs targeted at some of the highest growth areas of the market, such as mobile phones and other personal electronics.

Atmel offers reliable standard Two Touch and Single Touch touchscreen controllers.

Together with partners, the company offers complete touchscreen solutions for the most common screen sizes, including the chips and sensors, typically implemented as ITO on PET or glass.

Atmel's Two Touch controller ICs can track and report one or two simultaneous touches as separate x and y positions.

Common user-initiated gestures, including tap, double tap, flick and drag, as well as two-touch gestures such as zoom in, zoom out and rotate are implemented in the touchscreen controllers.

This approach allows designers to incorporate a comprehensive range of user-interface functions such as resizing and rotation of on-screen graphics, as well as allowing a two-finger gesture to replace multiple levels of menu access.

In addition to the touchscreen functions, the engineer can also implement the touch surface as a combination of touch keys and scrolling devices for additional flexibility.

This is configurable by the host processor through the industry standard two-wire, I2C compatible interface.

Peter Jones, general manager of Atmel's microcontroller division, said: 'The Two Touch devices give industrial designers the opportunity to incorporate next generation user interfaces into product developments.

'To support this activity our End-to-End reference designs can help speed the development cycle.

'These new products overcome many of the limitations of traditional resistive and capacitive touchscreen technologies.' For single-touch applications, Atmel offers a single-layer sensor minimising the mechanical stack and improving the optical performance of touchscreen displays.

The reduction of scatter and absorption of the available backlight results in improved light transmission and contrast, resulting in reduced power consumption.

The first Two Touch devices, AT42QT5320 and AT42QT5480, support screen sizes of up to 8in with a 16:9 aspect ratio.

The Single Touch devices, AT42QT4120 and AT42AT4160, support screen sizes of up to 4.3in with aspect ratios of 16:9 or 4:3.

The AT42QT5320 comes in a 5 x 5mm QFN package; the AT42QT5480 is available in 5 x 5mm BGA, a 7 x 7mm QFN and a 10 x 10mm TQFP package and supports up to four user controlled GPO's.

All packages are ROHS compliant.

The AT42QT4160 and AT42QT4120 single-touch devices can operate through up to 3mm plastic and 4mm glass panel thicknesses.

These devices are available in a 5 x 5mm QFN ROHS compliant package.

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