Cypress Semiconductor Corp. last week announced TrueTouch touchscreen controllers, called the TMA300 family. Atmel is scheduled this week to roll out a new family of touch screen solutions, EE Times has learned.

Atmel's new maXTouch products -- featuring unlimited touch -- offer "the industry's highest node count (224 nodes), the lowest power (4 milliwatts in active operation) and instant response (250Hz)," said John Carey, director, touch product marketing at Atmel. That performance translates into "twice the node counts and a three times faster refresh rate than those offered by our closest competitors," claimed Atmel's Carey.

More importantly, for Atmel, the company's new touch-screen products will represent "significant standalone revenue," according to Peter Jones, general manager, Atmel's microcontroller business unit. They are "the single biggest growth driver over the next two to three years."

That is no overstatement, considering that the smartphone market today is going through "a massive migration from resistive to capacitive touch screens," said Jones.

New touch screen products by Cypress and Atmel both use capacitive touch screen technologies. Atmel's other competitors in the capacitive touch screen market include Synaptics, Microchip Technology and IDT.

Dhwani Vyas, vice president of user interface business unit, at Cypress said, "We believe 50 percent of all resistive [touch screen-based] phones will be capacitive by 2010." He added, "It may vary by OEMs but leading players in Korea have already announced this transition."

While Apple's iPhone was the first to use capacitive touch screen technology, others are also joining the capacitive bandwagon. They include "Blackberry Storm, Palm Pre, LG Crystal and Chocolate, Samsung Ultratouch, HTC Hero (coming soon), Nokia N900, to name a few," said Susie Inouye, research director, principal analyst at Databeans, Inc.

Capacitive touch screen benefits

Cypress' Vyas finds clear advantages of capacitive touch screen technology over resistive in that "they are more durable; no issues with wear and tear; higher resistance to humidity/temp issues."

He also noted that the capacitive technology offers higher transparency. "It offers more than 90 percent transparency, compared to 80 percent in resistive," he said. "As LCDs increase in resolution, you don't want a low transparency resistive touch screen." Further, Vyas said, "Capacitive technology can be incorporated inside the LCD (incell). It allows for longer-term integration."

In summing up capacitive technology's overall benefits over resistive, Databean's Inouye said, "It requires less pressure (no stylus), it responds faster, it can handle multiple touches, the active area is larger, and it typically is less susceptible to wear and tear overtime."