VentureBeat talks maXStylus

Earlier this week, Atmel confirmed shipment of its second generation Windows 8.1-certified maXStylus in volume quantities. The new capacitive active stylus controller delivers a near-perfect ‘pen-to-paper’ writing experience on a touchscreen with superior responsiveness.

The CES 2014 announcement was covered by a number of tech publications and journalists, including VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi.

“The advantage of the new stylus microcontroller chip is that it provides accurate active-pen performance without an additional sensor layer. That reduces its cost for tablets, laptops, and smartphones. Touchscreens using Atmel’s MaxTouch touchscreen controller chips can seamlessly support MaxStylus controllers,” writes Takahashi.

“The screens can better distinguish between stylus touches and accidental touches by a user’s hand. The result is fewer missing strokes, dropped touches and other errors. You can even go from the stylus to your fingers with no degradation in performance. The new pens also deliver longer battery life.”

According to Atmel’s Shar Narasimhan, Stylus heralds a new generation of interaction with smart devices as users seek a more “intuitive experience” for their smartphones, tablets, notebooks and Ultrabooks.

“These smart devices also require richer feature sets to differentiate their products,” Narasimhan adds. “Over time, more users [will] adopt pens for [tasks] like official signatures and use of tablets for educational purposes.”

Atmel’s MaxStylus pens are slated to hit the market during the first quarter of 2014.

Interested in learning more about Atmel’s second generation maXStylus? You can check out the product page here and our official coverage of the announcement here.

Atmel ships second-gen maXStylus Active Pen


Atmel is now shipping its second generation Windows 8.1-certified maXStylus in volume quantities. The new capacitive active stylus controller delivers a near-perfect ‘pen-to-paper’ writing experience on a touchscreen with superior responsiveness.

According to Shar Narasimhan, Atmel Sr. Product Marketing Manager of Touchscreen and Stylus Products, touchscreens ranging from 6” to 15.6” using Atmel’s maXTouch controllers can seamlessly support maXStylus without additional hardware components or design changes.

“These solutions include our recently launched maXTouch T Series devices ranging from the mXT640T to the mXT2952T single-chip solutions. This integrated solution eliminates the need for an additional sensor layer, lowering overall system costs for the OEM without compromising performance,” Narasimhan explained. “The complete maXTouch and maXStylus solution has achieved Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 certification and can be [easily] integrated into [Microsoft] Windows 8.1 or [Google’s] Android OS.”

Narasimhan also noted that Atmel’s Stylus heralds a new era of interaction with smart devices as users seek a more intuitive experience on their smartphones, tablets, notebooks and Ultrabooks.

“These smart devices also require richer feature sets to differentiate their products,” he said. “We deliver the closest pen-to-paper experience available today for users writing with a capacitive active stylus on a touchscreen. Our next-generation maXStylus pen is currently in mass production with tier 1 OEMs and will be available on store shelves in early Q1.”

Today, competing active stylus solutions compromise the noise immunity and power levels of a system as the touchscreen struggles to distinguish between the pen and the user’s fingers. This degrades the overall system power consumption, signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio and pressure sensitivity resulting in missing strokes, dropped touches, poor linearity and an overall inferior user experience. 

With Atmel’s integrated solution, the maXStylus mXTS200 uses intelligent scanning and synchronization with the touch controller to deliver a higher SNR ratio. This results in the best capacitive stylus writing experience available on the market today – without comprising the touch controller’s noise immunity and power consumption of the overall system.

In addition, the maXStylus mXTS200 features intelligent palm rejection and the capability to switch from writing with a stylus to using both large and small fingers, without degrading capacitive touchscreen touch performance.

Interested in learning more? You can check out Atmel’s official maXStylus site here.