Nvidia, Atmel Doing 16-touch Tablets, MIDs

A collaboration between Atmal and Nvidia will bring up to 16 simultaneous touches to tablets and smartphones.

Monday during the Mobile World Congress (MWC) event in Barcelona, Spain, Atmel Corp said that it has collaborated with GPU giant Nvidia to bring high-performance, multi-touch, large-format touchscreen solutions to the market.

According to the announcement, Atmel is now showcasing a reference design using Nvidia's Tegra 2 and its maXTouch mXT1386 chipset. It also sports the Android OS, a screen allowing up to 16 simultaneous touches, a fast response time of over 150 Hz, and console-quality gaming. Ultimately the marriage will enable 16-input touchscreen designs up to 15.6-inches for smartphones, tablets, mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and other applications.

"By supporting grip suppression and palm rejection, the screen enables unconstrained usage and intuitive user experience," reads the chipset's description. "The device features multi-touch performance, enabling touches to be identified and individually tracked and allowing a range of built-in gestures to be reported to the host processor. Due to the high signal-to-noise ratio, the device works well with fingertip touch and can also be used with a conductive stylus."

The mXT1386 chipset is compatible with operating systems such as Linux, Android, and Windows as well as host interfaces like I2C and USB. Other features include better power consumption and rejection of unintended touches.

"Atmel and NVvidia have made many performance and accuracy improvements to make this solution ideal for tablet PC applications," said Jon Kiachian, sr. director of touch marketing, Atmel Corporation. "The Atmel maXTouch solution offers improved resolution, better linearity, faster response, and complete software and design support that will enable users of this reference design to bring their products faster-to-market."

Expect to hear more from the Atmel/Nvidia collaboration later this year.