Touchscreen Controllers Deftly Manage Ten Touches At Once

The TMA300 family of touchscreen controllers incorporates an analog sensing engine that’s claimed to offer 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 unique platform to create custom gestures without being constrained to two-finger touch. Based on the company’s PSoC programmable system-on-chip architecture, the TMA300 controllers are offered in a tiny chip-scale package (CSP) as well as in a thin 0.6-mm 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 V to 3.6 V, enabling very low power consumption for battery-operated devices. The controllers have applications in mobile handsets, portable media players, netbooks, notebooks, printers, digital still cameras, GPS systems and more. The 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. CYPRESS SEMICONDUCTOR CORP., San Jose, CA. (408) 943-2600.