San Jose, Calif., USA: With the arrival of the mXTS100, Atmel officially launched its maXStylus active stylus solution for tablets and smartphones. Binay Bajaj, Atmel’s director of marketing, explains that the mXTS100 provides high resolution writing with a 1mm stylus tip to accuracy of ±0.25mm. It provides palm rejection and supports advanced gesturing and pressure sensing capability with 256 pressure levels to enhance writing/drawing experiences.
“One important thing you need is to be able to write fast, especially for signatures,” says Bajaj. “maXStylus offers 140Hz, which is something our OEM customers are really excited about.”
Bajaj says that Atmel was seeing traction behind stylus applications increasing rapidly, especially now that the mXTS100 supports Windows 8 and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
“So far there has been a lack of apps available that can take advantage of active stylus. Now that there is operating-system support, it makes the user experience richer and so it will become more and more popular,” he says, pointing out that Atmel expects to see adoption of active stylus in 2012 and beyond.
Bajaj also noted that between Atmel’s maXTouch and new maXStylus solutions, simultaneous touch and stylus operation is possible. Referred to as multiSense functionality, this enables advanced gesturing, such as zooming in/out while writing and scrolling; page flipping while scrolling; and selecting a tool or content. Traditional solutions require two separate sensors for both stylus and finger touch functionality. With Atmel’s solutions, one sensor can be used to implement both a stylus and touch simultaneously.
Atmel Corp.
www.atmel.com