Cortus APS3 processor at the heart of PointChips' touch screen controller chip

SOUTH KOREA: PointChips, a South Korean company, has included the Cortus APS3 32 bit processor in their touch screen controller chip. The APS3 provides the processing power to translate the signals received from the sensors on a touch sensitive surface into information that can be used by a smart phone or tablet.

The APS3 processor, running custom software written by experts at PointChips, enhances the user experience of smart phone and tablet users with sophisticated features such as advanced gesture recognition and enhanced precision to ensure easy and reliable operation.

Mike Chapman, president and CEO of Cortus SA, said: “Once again we have enabled our customers to bring to market advanced functionality within their schedule and silicon and power budgets. This touch screen controller is a typical example of the use our customers put our processors to, requiring low power small silicon footprint yet high processing power all with easy and rapid firmware development.”

“The Cortus APS3 is an ideal processor for our design, it provides the processing power that we need and the low power consumption that our customers demand.” said Young Kim, Engineering VP of PointChips. "The software development tools enabled our engineers to develop the firmware easily and optimal design and simple interfaces ensured very rapid integration that have helped us keep ahead of our aggressive schedules. The small silicon footprint and the low power helped us meet our design goals and easily provided the required processing performance. The APS3 provides us with a competitive advantage and will be a key feature in many of our future controller designs.”

The Cortus APS3 is a high performance 32-bit processor designed specifically for embedded systems. It features a tiny silicon footprint (the same size as an 8051), very low power consumption, high code density and high performance (up to 1.67 DMIPS/MHz). A full development environment is available, which can be customised and branded for final customer use.

The ecosystem around the APS3 is rich and well developed, it includes a full development environment (for C and C++), peripherals typical of embedded systems, bus bridges to ensure easy interfacing to other IP and system support and functions such as cache and memory management units. For the most demanding designs the APS3 can be used in a multi-core configuration. The APS3 processor core is currently in production in a range of products from security applications to ultra low power RF designs.