Atmel’s New QTouch Surface Platform for Capacitive Touch Sensing

New Ultra-Low Power Capacitive Sensing Solution with Supporting Software

Atmel has released the new QTouch Surface platform for capacitive touch-enabled user interfaces. The new QTouch Surface platform builds on the market-proven QTouch capacitive touch button sensing technology supported by Atmel SMART MCUs. The new solution includes an on-chip peripheral touch controller (PTC), the cornerstone technology that enables higher performance capacitive touch on Atmel MCUs. Consuming less than 4µA, the QTouch Surface technology is perfect for wearables and other battery-powered applications that require a capacitive touch user interface.

“User interfaces in consumer products such as wearable/IoT devices, remote controls and PC/gaming controls are being driven by the massive adoption of touchscreens in smart phones and tablets,” said Geir Kjosavik, Director of QTouch Product Marketing, Atmel Corporation. “Products in this new category require a surface solution with lower power consumption and higher cost optimization that do not require the performance from higher-end touchscreen controllers. The QTouch Surface platform is the ideal solution to support all these requirements.”

The QTouch Surface solution uses only a fraction of the resources in Atmel SMART MCUs and can be implemented with virtually zero cost since one Atmel controller can be used for both the application and capacitive touch user interface.

Features of the QTouch Surface Platform include:

World’s lowest power capacitive touch surface control with a wake-up on a surface touch from a standby current down to 4µA
Works with all Atmel SMART MCUs featuring the Peripheral Touch Control using less than 10% CPU processing power
Supports multi touch on the following surface size ranges
2.7" with 2mm touch separation (edge to edge)
5.5" with 14mm touch separation (edge to edge)
Scan rates up to 100Hz

The company’s Web site address is www.microchip.com
[Reprinted with kind permission from Atmel]

Headlines

Other Stories

Futurlec is a worldwide supplier of quality electronic components to manufacturers, universities and hobbyists. We offer an extensive range of electronic parts including IC's, transistors, diodes, LED's, potentiometers and relays, all sourced from top quality manufacturers.

Futurlec also produce a wide range of microcontroller boards based on the PIC®, AVR®, ARM® and Arduino® platforms. Our PCB manufacturing service produces high quality PCB's for single PCB prototypes or large scale production volumes to your custom printed circuit board design.

* All trademarks mentioned here are the property of their respective companies