Cypress’s Gen4 TrueTouch controller in production ahead of schedule

SAN JOSE, USA: Cypress Semiconductor Corp. announced that its recently introduced Gen4 family of TrueTouch touchscreen controllers is now in production ahead of schedule.

Gen4 delivers industry-best performance in all categories, including the world’s best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and unparalleled performance in the presence of all noise sources—the biggest challenge faced by touchscreen designs. Gen4 also has the lowest active power consumption, assisting manufacturers in solving the ever increasing battery life issues common to handheld touchscreen devices.

“Customer reaction to the Gen 4 products has exceeded our high expectations and is expected to set new design win records for our True Touch products,” said Dhwani Vyas, VP of Cypress’s User Interface Business Unit.

“The ability to build thinner phones with flawless touchscreen performance without additional cost is proving to be extremely attractive to manufacturers. In addition, initial customer production shipments will begin in the first quarter of 2012, ahead of our previous estimates.”

Breakthrough noise elimination
The Gen4 family was designed from the ground up to deliver the world’s highest SNR in real world applications. It is the first and only touchscreen IC that delivers built-in 10V Tx to drive the touch panel at 10V. Because SNR is directly proportional to the voltage at which the panel is driven, this feature allows Cypress to offer nearly four times the SNR of the next closest competitor.

The Gen4 family further raises the SNR bar as the first touchscreen device family to completely eliminate display noise in hardware. Gen4’s patent-pending Display Armor offers unprecedented immunity to noise from every type of display, even noisy low-cost displays such as ACVCOM LCDs. This allows touchscreen designers to make their products thinner by removing the air gap between the display and the sensor, and also less expensive by removing the shield layer in the sensor. Display Armor allows Gen4 to operate seamlessly with direct lamination, on-cell and in-cell stackups, regardless of the display chemistry.

World’s fastest and lowest power touchscreen controller
In addition to unmatched noise performance, Gen4 offers the world’s lowest active power consumption of 2 mW, and a deep sleep mode that only draws 1.8 uW with wake-up via address match on the COM port. Shortened battery life is a common issue for smartphones and other portable touchscreen devices.

Gen4 gives OEMs another tool to help solve this problem. The Gen4 product family also boasts the industry’s fastest refresh rate of 400Hz, and has the unique ability to scan a capacitive touch panel at 1,000 Hz – both industry-best metrics. This level of performance is enabled by the 32-bit ARM Cortex core at the heart of the Gen4 products. The Gen4 family enables unlimited touch performance, while providing the industry’s best accuracy and linearity of 0.2 mm.

Gen4 also offers more capacitive sensing I/O than the competition, while still fitting into the world’s smallest touchscreen packages. With up to 40 I/O for mobile phone applications, Gen4 can support up to four standalone CapSense buttons while still delivering ideal sensor pitch for up to 5-inch screens.

The Gen4 family also offers features that only TrueTouch can deliver, including waterproofing functionality that allows products to meet IP-67 standards; 1-mm stylus support for Asian character sets and accurate handwriting capture; and hover sensing to provide mouseover-like features and true fingernail or thick-glove support in mobile devices.

Cypress’s unique, patent-pending ability to switch dynamically between self-capacitive and mutual-capacitive sensing methods in application enables these differentiating features. Cypress now has over 250 issued and pending patents pertaining to touchscreens.

Touchscreen leadership
Cypress’s touch sensing portfolio is the industry’s broadest and most well adopted, encompassing both TrueTouch and CapSense solutions. The Gen4 family is the latest in a string of touchscreen firsts from Cypress, the acknowledged industry leader in touch sensing. Examples include:

* Cypress was the first to deliver tracking of unlimited touches.
* Cypress was the first to deliver a true single-layer sensor solution for capacitive performance at resistive prices.
* The new Gen4 family, as well as prior generations, is offered in the world’s smallest CSP packages for important space savings in handsets.
* Cypress is still the only company to offer the patent-pending self and mutual capacitance sensing on the same chip, enabling the development of advanced features like waterproofing, support for 1mm stylus, and hover without increased material or spatial costs.
* TrueTouch is designed to work with major mobile platforms, including Android and Windows 8.