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Multitouch-touchscreen IC

Cypress Semiconductor has introduced the TMA300 family in its TrueTouch touchscreen controller range. Based on the PSoC programmable SoC (System-on-Chip) technology, you would use the devices in touchscreen-based user interfaces for applications such as mobile handsets, portable media players, netbooks, notebooks, printers, digital still cameras, and GPS systems. The family, with an integrated analogue sensing engine, allows tracking of multiple fingers simultaneously with precise x-y locations and without user delays or any erroneous “ghost” responses. It supports traditional gesture detection such as tap, double-tap, pan, pinch, scroll, and rotate, and it also provides developers with a platform to create custom gestures that does not constrain them to two-finger touch. The device comes in a CSP (chip-scale package) as well as in a thin—0.6-mm-profile—QFN package. These package options give end customers a range of options for mounting the controllers on flex modules and/or directly on a printed-circuit board with minimal area impact. The new devices also support input voltages from 1.7 to 3.6V.

Features include low-cost 3-mm passive-stylus input, proximity detection that enables ear/face/palm rejection, water-proofing and a “hover” feature that meets the touch requirements for operating systems such as Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile and Windows7. Cypress says that its architecture, based on a capacitive- sensing technique, has good noise immunity for operation in noisy RF and LCD environments. The multi-touch all-point TrueTouch family includes the CY8CTMA300E device with 32 kbytes of flash and the CY8CTMA301E device with 16 kbytes of flash. Both products are offered in 36- and 48-pin QFN packages, and the CY8CTMA300E additionally comes in a tiny 49-pin chip-scale package.

Cypress Semiconductor, www.cypress.com