SAN JOSE, Calififornia, September 9 /PRNewswire/ --

- Offers single-chip integration, unlimited touch, industry's lowest 
power, most accurate and fastest response with finger or stylus input

Atmel(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) announced today the production
release of its new maXTouch(TM) family of capacitive touchscreen controller
solutions, capable of supporting an unlimited number of unique simultaneous
touches with a video-quality screen refresh rate of 250 Hz. Atmel's new
maXTouch technology platform supports the development of touchscreens
surpassing 10 inches with full zoom, rotate, handwriting and shape
recognition functionality. In addition, this new touchscreen solution
features Atmel's patented charge transfer technology which enhances the
traditional mutual and self-capacitance solutions, now effectively tripling
the industry's highest performance touchscreen solutions.

Atmel's maXTouch solutions have been developed to provide uncompromising
capacitive touch capability combined with the industry's lowest power
consumption and unsurpassed configurability to exceed today's user interface
requirements. The first device in the family, the mXT224, has 224 nodes that
allow it to accurately report the positions of unlimited, simultaneous
touches and it can completely redraw the screen every 4/1000 of a second (4
mS). The mXT224's large number of nodes and fast performance makes it the
world's first touchscreen solution suitable for advanced touch screen
functionality, such as rejection of unintended touches, stretch/pinch and
rotate gestures, handwriting and shape recognition such as face detection on
mobile phones, mobile Internet devices (MID) and netbook screens surpassing
10 inches.

By integrating the entire capacitive sensing circuitry on-chip, these
maXTouch products provide a fully integrated single-chip solution without the
need for external components to support the capacitive sensing, minimizing
the cost and PCB footprint requirements. Multiple mXT224 touchscreen
solutions can be used to provide smaller interspatial distances between
touches on larger screens. Products utilizing the advanced mXT224 touchscreen
solution are currently progressing in design at several leading handset,
netbook and other consumer product OEMs.

"By 2013, worldwide demand for touch screen modules will exceed US$6.4
billion, making touch interfaces the fastest growing segment in the displays
industry. Multi-touch solutions are delivering significant advantages across
a broad range of applications, and Atmel appears to have a compelling product
for a very hot market. We'll definitely be watching as they roll it out,"
said Joe Abelson, Vice President, Displays Research, iSuppli Corporation.

The mXT224 is the first capacitive touchscreen solution able to support
not just finger touch but also stylus, fingernails and gloves for drawing or
signature capture and character recognition, thanks to its 80:1
signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and extremely fast refresh rate. A high SNR is
critical for the accurate reporting of adjacent or weak signals, and allows
for precise reporting in noisy environments such as products with noise
coupled from radio transceivers, LCD displays and battery chargers. Solutions
without a suitably high SNR consume more power and decrease their response
time with extra filtering and processing in an attempt to extract a weak
signal from a high noise environment. In contrast, the nearest competing
off-the-shelf touchscreen solution has half as many nodes as the mXT224, a
screen refresh rate of only 83 Hz (66% slower) and an SNR of only 25:1 (66%
less). In addition to offering the best SNR rates in the market, maXTouch
offers advanced noise suppression algorithms to provide end products with the
ultimate immunity against coupled noise issues.

Mutual Capacitance and Charge Transfer Technologies. By combining Atmel's
patented Charge Transfer and XMEGA(TM) technologies, Atmel's engineering
teams have produced an optimal and scalable architecture which enables smart
processing of a capacitive touch image to accurately regenerate and report
the user's interaction with the touchscreen. The unlimited number of touches
possible with Atmel's maXTouch technology is the result of its mutual
capacitive sensor design, combined with Atmel's Charge Transfer method of
signal acquisition. Unlike self capacitance technologies that sense
individual rows or columns leaving ambiguity in reported multi-touch
positions, mutual capacitance sensors create a matrix of independent
capacitive sensing nodes at the intersections of these rows and columns.
Using Atmel's maXTouch technology, each of these nodes are independently
scanned within the matrix accurately sensing the position of an unlimited
number of touches and delivering smooth movement in any location of the
screen.

Processor Considerations. The processing efficiency provided by the
XMEGA(TM) microcontroller CPU allows the chip to ignore unintentional
activity such as facial touch when on a call with a mobile phone. This
capability, combined with the ability to collect the charge image in near
theoretical times, allows the maXTouch products to demonstrate extraordinary
performance. The mXT224 integrates Atmel's single-cycle RISC AVR(R) core with
32 registers and two on-chip DSP engines that process the X and Y positions
on the touchscreen. An event system and peripheral DMA controller off-load
all inter-peripheral communications and data transfer operations from the
CPU, freeing it up for post-processing of the sensor image. This architecture
enables the simultaneous processing of 224 nodes at 250 Hz, while consuming
less than 1.8mW.

"Since we announced the maXTouch technology in May of this year, many of
the world's largest touchscreen customers are moving rapidly to adopt
maXTouch products and take full advantage of the technology feature set in
their next generation products," said Peter Jones, Managing Director of
Atmel's Microcontroller Business Unit. "maXTouch provides capabilities and
features not available in existing capacitive and resistive touchscreen
technologies and expands the universe of user interface design
possibilities."

Availability and Pricing

The mXT224 product is the first in a family of capacitive sensing
controller solutions that eliminate the need for external components to
support the capacitive sensing thereby minimizing cost and reducing PCB
footprint requirements. It is available now in a 5x5mm BGA package and is
priced at US$4.75 in 1M quantity. Additional maXTouch touchscreen solutions
will be introduced in the fourth quarter of 2009 and 2010.

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.

(c) 2009 Atmel Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Atmel(R), Atmel logo and
combinations thereof, AVR(R) and others, are registered trademarks,
maXTouch(TM), XMEGA(TM) and others are trademarks of Atmel Corporation or its
subsidiaries. Other terms and product names may be trademarks of others.

Information:

Atmel's maXTouch Touchscreen Technology information may be retrieved at:

http://www.bulldogsolutions.net/AtmelCorporation/ATM_LandingPage/index.aspx?bdls=21067

Press Contacts:
    Clive Over, Director of Corporate Marketing
    Tel: +1-408-436-4305, Email: clive.over@atmel.com