23.10.2008 – 00:12

Atmel Corporation

Atmel's New Family of Touch Screen Solutions Enable Two Touch Gestures for Intuitive User Interfaces

San Jose, California (ots/PRNewswire)

- New Product Line also Includes First to Market Single Layer ITO
Touchscreen Solutions for Single Touch Applications

Atmel(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) today announced its new line
of charge-transfer, capacitive touchscreen controller ICs targeted at
some of the highest growth areas of the electronics market, such as
mobile phones and other personal electronics. Atmel, with millions of
custom touchscreen solutions shipped over the past few years, offers
highly reliable standard Two Touch(TM) and Single Touch touchscreen
controllers. Together with partners, the company also offers complete
touchscreen solutions for the most common screen sizes, including the
chips and sensors, typically implemented as ITO on PET or glass.

Atmel's Two Touch controller ICs can track and report one or two
simultaneous touches as separate X and Y positions. Common user
initiated gestures, including tap, double tap, flick and drag, as
well as two touch gestures such as zoom in, zoom out and rotate are
implemented in the touchscreen controllers. This approach allows
designers to incorporate a comprehensive range of user interface
functions such as resizing and rotation of on-screen graphics, as
well as allowing a two finger gesture to replace multiple levels of
menu access.

In addition to the touchscreen functions, the engineer can also
implement the touch surface as a combination of touch keys and
scrolling devices for additional flexibility -- this is configurable
by the host processor through the industry standard two-wire, I2C
compatible interface.

Peter Jones, General Manager of Atmel's microcontroller division
said, "Our new Two Touch devices give industrial designers the
opportunity to incorporate next generation, cost effective user
interfaces into their new product developments with ease. To support
this activity our End-to-End reference designs help speed the
development cycle. These new products overcome many of the
limitations of traditional resistive and capacitive touchscreen
technologies. Also with our single layer ITO solutions, customers can
achieve excellent performance at a very competitive price."

For single touch applications, Atmel offers a unique single layer
sensor minimizing the mechanical stack, and improving the optical
performance of touchscreen displays. The reduction of scatter and
absorption of the available backlight results in improved light
transmission, contrast and results in highly reduced power
consumption.

The first Two Touch devices, AT42QT5320 and AT42QT5480, support
screen sizes of up to 8" with a 16:9 aspect ratio. The single touch
devices, AT42QT4120 and AT42AT4160, support screen sizes of up to
4.3" with aspect ratios of 16:9 or 4:3. The AT42QT5320 comes in a 5x5
mm QFN package; the AT42QT5480 is available in 5x5 mm BGA, a 7x7 mm
QFN and a 10x10mm TQFP package and also supports up to four user
controlled GPO's. All packages are RoHS compliant.

The AT42QT4160 and AT42QT4120 single touch devices can operate
through up to 3mm plastic and 4mm glass panel thicknesses. The
devices are available in a 5x5 mm QFN RoHS compliant package.

Availability and Pricing

Samples are now available and production quantities will be
available in Q1 2009. Pricing for touchscreen controller devices
start at US$2.50 for high volume projects.

Footnote:
    ITO = Indium Tin Oxide
    PET = Polyethylene terephthalate

About Atmel

Atmel is a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of
microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory
and radio frequency (RF) components. Leveraging one of the industry's
broadest intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, Atmel is
able to provide the electronics industry with complete system
solutions focused on consumer, industrial, security, communications,
computing and automotive markets.

With its new touch technology division, formerly known as Quantum
Research Group(TM), the company now offers dedicated touch sense
controllers addressing applications in the mobile communication and
entertainment markets as well as in PC, appliances and automotive
applications.

(C) 2008 Atmel Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Atmel(R), Atmel
logo and combinations thereof, and others, are registered trademarks,
Two Touch(TM) and others are trademarks of Atmel Corporation or its
subsidiaries. Other terms and product names may be trademarks of
others.

Information:

Atmel's touchscreen product information may be retrieved at,
http://www.atmel.com/touchscreen

For further information on touch technology products, visit
http://www.atmel.com

Press Contacts:
    Chris Ard, Director of Marketing - Touch technology division
    Tel: +44-23-8056-5600, Email:  chris.ard@atmel.com
    Helen Perlegos, Public Relations
    Tel: +1-408-487-2963, Email:  hperlegos@atmel.com
    Robert Huntley, (PR agency)
    Tel: +44-1225-470000, Email:  robert.huntley@publitek.com

Web site: http://www.atmel.com

Contact:

Chris Ard, Director of Marketing - Touch technology division,
+44-23-8056-5600, chris.ard@atmel.com, or Helen Perlegos, Public
Relations, +1-408-487-2963, hperlegos@atmel.com, both of Atmel
Corporation; or Robert Huntley, +44-1225-470000,
robert.huntley@publitek.com, for Atmel Corporation