Cypress Unveils New Multi-Touch All-Point Solution

Cypress Semiconductor has introduced new, fully-integrated TrueTouch touchscreen controllers, the TMA300 family, based on the PSoC programmable system-on-chip architecture.

The company said the new controllers offer performance and features that are helping to accelerate the development of next-generation differentiated touchscreen-based user interfaces for applications in mobile handsets, portable media players, netbooks, notebooks, printers, digital still cameras, GPS systems and more.

The TMA300 family represents the next generation of multi-touch all-point technology. The integrated analog sensing engine offers what Cypress called the industry's fastest and most accurate touchscreen user experience. This responsiveness allows tracking of multiple fingers simultaneously with precise x-y locations and without user delays or problems with erroneous "ghost" responses. The family supports traditional gestures such as tap, double-tap, pan, pinch, scroll, and rotate, and also provides developers a platform to create custom gestures without being constrained to two-finger touch.

Cypress offers the TMA300 family in a tiny chip-scale package (CSP) as well as in a thin 0.6mm 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 1.7V to 3.6V, enabling what Cypress called very low power consumption for battery operated devices.

The company said its TMA300 family will support a range of new features including low-cost 3mm passive stylus input, proximity detection that enables ear/face/palm rejection, water proofing and a "hover" feature that meets the touch requirements of operating systems such as Symbian, Android, Windows Mobile and Windows7. In addition, the new devices offer Cypress's legendary noise immunity with patented capacitive sensing technology that enables flawless operation in noisy RF and LCD environments.

"Our new multi-touch all-point TrueTouch family has been designed-in to multiple platforms by top-tier manufacturers," said Chris Seams, executive vice president of Sales and Marketing at Cypress. "Our customers continue to choose TrueTouch for its performance, flexibility and value."

"Cypress's new multi-touch touchscreen controllers deliver the industry's fastest and most accurate tracking, and the excellent power consumption required by world-class consumer electronics devices," said Norm Taffe, executive vice president of the Consumer and Computation Division at Cypress. "These improvements add to the TrueTouch architecture's advantages of programmability and integration, as well as the flexibility to choose from a wide range of touchscreen module suppliers."

The new 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 is also offered in a tiny 49-pin chip-scale package. The devices have been sampling since early 2009 with OEMs, and volume ramp-ups have already started. Development kits are available to select customers through Cypress sales.

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