Cypress' TrueTouch Touchscreen Solution

ELECTRONICS: Cypress Semiconductor Corp. announced highly accurate passive stylus support for capacitive touchscreen technology. With a 1 mm accurate tip, Cypress’s TrueTouch™ touchscreen solution is poised to transform the stylus market for the next generation of capacitive touchscreen phones, allowing users additional levels of accuracy and control for text entry, keyboard, handwriting recognition and other productive functions for mobile applications. Stylus accuracy enables users to enter complex Asian characters and to point to ever-smaller icons used in today’s mobile phone user interfaces.

Cypress’s TrueTouch family includes single-touch, multitouch gesture and multitouch all-point offerings. Cypress was the first company to introduce multitouch all-point functionality, which can track an unlimited number of touches. This capability enables designers to create new usage models for products such as mobile handsets, portable media players (PMPs), GPS systems and other products, and has been in mass production since 2008. TrueTouch is the industry’s most flexible touchscreen architecture, which allows designers to implement differentiated features and make last-minute design iterations without board changes.

Cypress also recently announced its next-generation high-performance TMA300 multitouch all-point family. This controller provides best-in-class scan times for true multifinger touch and superior signal-to-noise ratio for the most demanding touchscreen applications.

The flexible TrueTouch solution allows customers to rapidly develop leading-edge solutions without having to buy turnkey modules. They have a choice of using touch sensors (glass or film) and LCDs from preferred partners, and can develop innovative mechanical designs ranging from flat to curved surfaces of varying thickness. In addition, TrueTouch devices offer Cypress’s noise immunity with patented capacitive sensing technology that enables flawless operation in noisy RF and LCD environments.

Cypress is working with lead customers on stylus support for the TrueTouch touchscreen solution. A stylus support module is expected to be broadly available in the second quarter of 2010.

-Edited by Kelsey Anderson