This will be good for apps such as party games on tablet computers.
Atmel is announcing new display chips today that will mean that touchscreen devices of the future will be much faster, more accurate, and able to accommodate as many 16 finger touches at once.
The new chips will advance the state-of-the-art in touchscreen displays, which are becoming popular as a natural user interface in everything from smartphones to iPads. I've noticed in iPad games that the screens are too slow to respond to multiple touches. They're also prone to false touches, like when you accidentally brush the screen with your wrist or grip the screen on the side panel.
But the new maxTouch sensor-microcontroller chips from Atmel will fix that. They have a feature to reject touches that are perceived to be accidental, said Binay Bajaj, senior product marketing at San Jose, Calif.-based Atmel, which has been around since 1984 and has 5,600 employees.
The microcontrollers are actually designed for unlimited numbers of fingers touching capacitive touchscreens. But in response to customer requests and to keep the costs down, Atmel limited the touches to 16 fingers. The chips work in screens ranging from 5 to 15 inches, so they're ideal for tablet computers, netbooks and laptops. The larger number of fingers on the screen will be great for new apps such as party games. My family has been playing Party Pad from Real Networks on the iPad, where three or four people can roll virtual marbles on a screen at once.
The screens using these chips will have response times of 7 milliseconds, which is two or three times faster than competing screens on the market today. That's important because I've heard game developers complain that fast-action games are actually too fast for the response times of screens on the iPhone and iPod touch. You can use a stylus with these chips as well as your fingers.
The new maxTouch chips are an update to a version launched last September. The earlier model was geared to smartphones with smaller screens and are now used in millions of phones. Rivals include Synaptics as well as proprietary solutions from companies such as Apple.
Touchscreens today often use predictive capacitance. You put your finger on a screen and it changes the electrical field on an invisible grid covering the screen. Electrodes change the capacitance of the screen and then the coordinates of the touch location are detected, processed, and sent on to the computing part of the device. Touchscreen devices with the new chips will be coming out later this year. Atmel isn't saying the exact cost, but a controller is typically 25 percent of a touchscreen's electronics cost.
The maxTouch chips originated from Atmel's acquisition two years ago of Quantum in the U.K. Atmel combined its own microcontroller technology with Quantum's analog sensors. Over time, Bajaj said that his company will be able to support unlimited finger touches on bigger screens. Touchscreens in computers are expected to exceed 115 million by 2014, according to market researcher iSuppli.