Atmel® Corporation (NASDAQ: ATML) announced production of the mXT106xT2 family of devices, expanding the company’s popular maXTouch® T series of touchscreen controllers. The new touchscreen controllers incorporate all of the latest features flagship smartphones have with hover, stylus, superior noise immunity, but now are available in the larger format market for screen sizes of 7 – 8.9″. Atmel’s maXTouch is the only product available today to enable finger hover up to 20mm on devices larger than a smartphone. This capability allows the user to interact with their device without physically making contact with the screen through gestures, zoom, etc.
The T Series incorporates Atmel’s Adaptive Sensing technology to enable dynamic touch classification, a feature that automatically and intelligently switches between self- and mutual-capacitance sensing to provide users a seamless transition between a finger touch, hover, passive or active stylus or glove touch. It eliminates the need for users to manually enable ‘glove mode’ in the operating system to differentiate between hover and glove modes. Additionally, Adaptive Sensing dramatically reduces the power consumption in the device allowing for longer battery life. The mXT106xT2 offer these features required in today’s tablet devices including 0.4mm thin cover lenses and multifinger glove support for users in cold weather climates. For users who seek the extensive benefits in going paperless, the mXT106xT2 also offers stylus capabilities in either active stylus through Atmel’s maXStylus or passive stylus with a 1mm tip to facilitate more precise selection.
This mid-size performance tablet space is the fastest growing market in the touchscreen world currently with CAGRs over 30 percent, expecting to top 160Mu in 2014. Atmel has already shown success in these screen sizes with design wins at ASUS, Lenovo, LG and Toshiba to name a few. This market growth stems from Intel’s recent reference designs, Windows 8.1 adoption and improving general user experience for balancing convenience with a larger screen size to better view your content.
The 106xT2 enables the same performance features of Atmel’s T Series maXTouch controllers, while also enabling capacitive button, slider and wheel control through the embedded hardware module known as the Peripheral Touch Controller (PTC). This feature allows systems to integrate these capacitive buttons without tying up nodes from the touch controller, performing with improved noise immunity, no external components and lower power than when implemented in firmware.
“We are excited to be releasing the highest performance touchscreen controller with this addition to our T Series product just as this market is exploding,” said Patrick Hanley, Touch Marketing Manager, Atmel Corporation. “With the increasing demand for user functionality with hover, glove, PTC and stylus support, the extension of the T Series further prepares OEMs to be one step closer to making the consumer’s dream a reality.”
Availability
The new devices in the maXTouch T Series are in production now and the 8.3″ screen size evaluation kit will be available in May. These will show hover, stylus (both active and passive), and PTC support using the latest maXStudio tools.
Atmel
www.atmel.com
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