Atmel Enables Superior Touchscreen Solutions With Introduction of New Family of maXTouch(TM) Products

San Jose, Calififornia (ots/PRNewswire) -

- Offers single-chip integration, unlimited touch, industry's
lowest power, most accurate and fastest response with finger or
stylus input

Atmel(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) announced today the
production release of its new maXTouch(TM) family of capacitive
touchscreen controller solutions, capable of supporting an unlimited
number of unique simultaneous touches with a video-quality screen
refresh rate of 250 Hz. Atmel's new maXTouch technology platform
supports the development of touchscreens surpassing 10 inches with
full zoom, rotate, handwriting and shape recognition functionality.
In addition, this new touchscreen solution features Atmel's patented
charge transfer technology which enhances the traditional mutual and
self-capacitance solutions, now effectively tripling the industry's
highest performance touchscreen solutions.

Atmel's maXTouch solutions have been developed to provide
uncompromising capacitive touch capability combined with the
industry's lowest power consumption and unsurpassed configurability
to exceed today's user interface requirements. The first device in
the family, the mXT224, has 224 nodes that allow it to accurately
report the positions of unlimited, simultaneous touches and it can
completely redraw the screen every 4/1000 of a second (4 mS). The
mXT224's large number of nodes and fast performance makes it the
world's first touchscreen solution suitable for advanced touch screen
functionality, such as rejection of unintended touches, stretch/pinch
and rotate gestures, handwriting and shape recognition such as face
detection on mobile phones, mobile Internet devices (MID) and netbook
screens surpassing 10 inches.

By integrating the entire capacitive sensing circuitry on-chip,
these maXTouch products provide a fully integrated single-chip
solution without the need for external components to support the
capacitive sensing, minimizing the cost and PCB footprint
requirements. Multiple mXT224 touchscreen solutions can be used to
provide smaller interspatial distances between touches on larger
screens. Products utilizing the advanced mXT224 touchscreen solution
are currently progressing in design at several leading handset,
netbook and other consumer product OEMs.

"By 2013, worldwide demand for touch screen modules will exceed
US$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.

The mXT224 is the first capacitive touchscreen solution able to
support not just finger touch but also stylus, fingernails and gloves
for drawing or signature capture and character recognition, thanks to
its 80:1 signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and extremely fast refresh rate.
A high SNR is critical for the accurate reporting of adjacent or weak
signals, and allows for precise reporting in noisy environments such
as products with noise coupled from radio transceivers, LCD displays
and battery chargers. Solutions without a suitably high SNR consume
more power and decrease their response time with extra filtering and
processing in an attempt to extract a weak signal from a high noise
environment. In contrast, 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.

Mutual Capacitance and Charge Transfer Technologies. By combining
Atmel's patented Charge Transfer and XMEGA(TM) technologies, Atmel's
engineering teams have produced an optimal and scalable architecture
which enables smart processing of a capacitive touch image to
accurately regenerate and report the user's interaction with the
touchscreen. The unlimited number of touches possible with Atmel's
maXTouch technology is the result of its mutual capacitive sensor
design, combined with Atmel's Charge Transfer method of signal
acquisition. Unlike self capacitance technologies that sense
individual rows or columns leaving ambiguity in reported multi-touch
positions, mutual capacitance sensors create a matrix of independent
capacitive sensing nodes at the intersections of these rows and
columns. Using Atmel's maXTouch technology, each of these nodes are
independently scanned within the matrix accurately sensing the
position of an unlimited number of touches and delivering smooth
movement in any location of the screen.

Processor Considerations. The processing efficiency provided by
the XMEGA(TM) microcontroller CPU allows the chip to ignore
unintentional activity such as facial touch when on a call with a
mobile phone. This capability, combined with the ability to collect
the charge image in near theoretical times, allows the maXTouch
products to demonstrate extraordinary performance. The mXT224
integrates Atmel's single-cycle RISC AVR(R) core with 32 registers
and two on-chip DSP engines that process the X and Y positions on the
touchscreen. An event system and peripheral DMA controller off-load
all inter-peripheral communications and data transfer operations from
the CPU, freeing it up for post-processing of the sensor image. This
architecture enables the simultaneous processing of 224 nodes at 250
Hz, while consuming less than 1.8mW.

"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 and Pricing

The mXT224 product is the first in a family of capacitive sensing
controller solutions that eliminate the need for external components
to support the capacitive sensing thereby minimizing cost and
reducing PCB footprint requirements. It is available now in a 5x5mm
BGA package and is priced at US$4.75 in 1M quantity. Additional
maXTouch touchscreen solutions will be introduced in the fourth
quarter of 2009 and 2010.

About Atmel

Atmel is a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of
microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory
and radio frequency (RF) components. Leveraging one of the industry's
broadest intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, Atmel is
able to provide the electronics industry with complete system
solutions focused on consumer, industrial, security, communications,
computing and automotive markets.

(c) 2009 Atmel Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Atmel(R), Atmel
logo and combinations thereof, AVR(R) and others, are registered
trademarks, maXTouch(TM), XMEGA(TM) and others are trademarks of
Atmel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other terms and product names
may be trademarks of others.

Information:

Atmel's maXTouch Touchscreen Technology information may be
retrieved at:

http://www.bulldogsolutions.net/AtmelCorporation/ATM_LandingPage/
index.aspx?bdls=21067

Press Contacts:
Clive Over, Director of Corporate Marketing
Tel: +1-408-436-4305, Email: clive.over@atmel.com

ots Originaltext: Atmel Corporation
Im Internet recherchierbar: http://www.presseportal.de

Contact:
Clive Over, Director of Corporate Marketing of Atmel Corporation,
+1-408-436-4305, clive.over@atmel.com