Cypress TrueTouch touchscreen in Sharp's Sportio water beat phone

SAN JOSE, USA: Cypress Semiconductor Corp. today announced that the TrueTouch touchscreen solution from Cypress implements the new waterproof touchscreen for the KDDI Sportio water beat mobile phone.

The new phone, manufactured by Sharp Communication Systems Group, has a 3-inch touchscreen with brilliant colors, and integrates a water resistive feature equivalent to IPX5/7*.

The Sportio water beat is oriented towards active users, with a small size and weight along with applications geared towards fitness, golf and other outdoor activities using both GPS and accelerometer technologies. The new phone also offers rich entertainment capabilities such as one-segment digital TV, a 3.2-megapixel camera and an audio player.

Cypress’s TrueTouch family, based on the PSoC® programmable system-on-chip architecture, includes single-touch, multi-touch and “multi-touch all-point” offerings. The multi-touch all-point solution can track up to 10 simultaneous touches, a feature unmatched by competing products. The Cypress TrueTouch solution also enables the industry’s best water rejection, as shown by the Sportio water beat phone.

In addition, TrueTouch is the industry’s most flexible touchscreen solution, as the unique PSoC architecture allows designers to implement differentiated features and make last-minute design iterations without board changes. With the TrueTouch architecture, customers can choose to work with a wide variety of touchscreen vendors and/or LCD module vendors to create their designs.

“The Sportio water beat is an amazing product and we are happy to see TrueTouch technology contribute to its rich feature set,” said Norm Taffe, executive vice president of Cypress’s Consumer and Computation Division. “Our waterproof technology is one of many features that set TrueTouch apart from competitive offerings.”

“The TrueTouch solution continues to grow in popularity among leading Japanese companies,” said Hitoshi Yoshizawa, Japan country manager for Cypress. “The unmatched flexibility and performance of TrueTouch along with our excellent local technical support staff offer customers the best choice for implementing touchscreens.”

TrueTouch
Touchscreens have become the user interface of choice for many applications. Touchscreen technology addresses the conflicting demands for smaller products with larger displays by eliminating traditional buttons without sacrificing screen size. They also enable users to manipulate new functions easily and intuitively by interacting directly with content on the screen.

Cypress’s TrueTouch devices support projected capacitive touchscreens, which offer numerous benefits over touchscreens based on resistive technology. These advantages include optical clarity, durability, reliability and cost-effective implementation of multi-touch features. The TrueTouch family is the industry’s broadest touchscreen offering, including single-touch, multi-touch gesture, and multi-touch all-point solutions.

Based on the flexible PSoC architecture, the TrueTouch solution enables designers to integrate additional functions such as driving LEDs, backlight control and I/O expansion. These functions, in conjunction with flexible communication options (I2C and SPI), allow for unparalleled system integration for touchscreen systems.