This is the world’s lowest power capacitive touch solution

We’re excited to announce 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,” explained Geir Kjosavik, Atmel Director of QTouch Product Marketing. “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.

Notable 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

A demonstration of the new QTouch Surface platform will be available at CES next month inside booth #MP25760 in the South Hall of the LVCC. Meanwhile, the QTouch Surface platform — including the library firmware, software development tool and plug-and-play hardware kits — will also be on display at Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany in late February 2015.