Yesterday afternoon, Jan 10th, at CES 2012 was Touch Screen Controller time. Since all of our smart phones and tablets are interacted with by use of a touch screen, this space has become very lucrative with more than a half a billion devices employing capacitive touch screen controllers. Has it become a commodity device yet? It looks like the answer is no. The two vendors we visited, Atmel and Synaptics, are continuing to innovate.
Atmel is introducing their new MaxTouch S series of touch screen controllers for smartphones and tablets. The S series supports the reduction of a thinner total screen stack-up by eliminating the ITO shield. This enables system designers to deliver mobile products that are thinner and lighter than was previously possible, without sacrificing immersive responsiveness, touch fidelity, or battery life. This is very impressive technology from the market leader, and with a lot of existing and new players vying for a piece of the pie, it is great to see them continuing to innovate in significant and meaningful ways.
Thinner and lighter display stacks through the Atmel S Series Touch Screen Controllers
The new product line from Atmel features the MXT224S, a 224 node controller for screens from 3.5″ up to 4.3″. The MXT336S, a 336 node touch screen controller for screens 4.3″ up to 5.5″ and the MXT1664S, a 1,664 node (wow!) touch screen controller for screens up to 17″. Nice for larger laptops or, we suppose, really big tablets.
The demonstration was very good, however we need to say that Atmel was reluctant to share any specific technical or architectural details on their technology, preferring to stay on message for a consumer-oriented show. We were specifically interested to know if they would continue to use a single-die for different models, much like what we recently learned in our analysis of the MXT540E and the MXT768E. But, sorry folks, we’re staying tight lipped there. Allowing us a bit of self promotion – look for our upcoming Circuit Analysis Report on the new MXT540E analog front end. In this report you will learn what makes the MXT540E and the MXT6768E tick.
Atmel MXT540E and MXT768E die at metal 1
Next-up, we spoke with Synaptics, another touch screen player. In their suite, Mr. Nick Rottler, Senior Marketing Manager was very gracious in demonstrating their latest and greatest.
Synaptics has just launched their new ClearPad 7300 touch screen controllers for tablets. The ClearPad 7300 supports up to 12-inch touchscreens with high-performance tracking of 10 or more fingers. The ClearPad 7300 is designed for the rapidly growing tablet market, including both Google Android and Microsoft Windows 8 devices. Nick advises that “devices are sampling now and we can expect to see products employing the Clearpad 7300 by mid year.”
Synaptics ClearPad 7300 Demonstration Tablet
We got to talking about roadmaps for Synaptics TSC solutions and the innovation just does not stop. One of the levels of integration we have been waiting for is chip on glass, or at least as a first step the integration of the display driver and the touch screen controller all in one. Well guess what is on the Synaptics roadmap? Yup, they call it TDDI, Touch Display Driver Integration. This will be a very cool as it will drop the bill of materials by one device while improving the signal to noise ratio and eliminate display noise. These new devices are sampling now and Synaptics is hopeful that we will see tablets and phones employing Synaptics TDDI technology by mid next year.
Synaptics Touch Screen Controller Roadmap
Now the last bit of news, and possibly the most interesting. After the demonstration, Dr. Andrew Hsu, Technology Strategist at Synaptics dropped by. I asked Andrew what he thought of the nVidia announcement last night of their new DirectTouch solution. Andrew says that I am not the only one to ask him about this and then he starts to laugh. I ask him if this news is a potential threat to Synaptics and others and Andrew replied, “I hope not, we helped nVidia develop DirectTouch.”
I asked Andrew to explain and he tells me that you could implement a solution that only uses a capacitive ADC and pump the data direct into the application processor, but why would you. The MCU cleans up the pixel data and provides the application processor with nice clean data that can then be crunched to make for an even more responsive touch screen solution. We can’t wait to see the first consumer tablet running the Tegra 3 and a Synaptics touch screen controller. As stated earlier, innovation in this market is not sitting still and there is a long way to go. We at Chipworks look forward to placing the Clearpad 7300 and their other new products into our labs.
