Date: 29/07/2009

Resistive touch screen controllers for large volume small formfactor embedded systems

Microchip's new mTouch AR1000 Resistive Touch-Screen Controllers with 10-bit touch resolution is suitable for high volume small formfactor embedded system applications. This analog resistive touch-screen controller packs built-in decoding, filtering, and controller-driven calibration.

AR1000 controller replace old trial and error type Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) based resistive touch interface by offering proprietary touch-screen decoding algorithms to send reliable touch coordinates. AR1000 accepts finger, glove or stylus-pen touch inputs.

"The AR1000 controllers give designers the flexibility they need to quickly and easily
implement analog resistive touch-screen interfaces," said Steve Drehobl, vice president of Microchip's Security, Microcontroller and Technology Development Division. "The controllers meet the needs of today's touch solutions with low cost and reduced development time, while delivering the Microchip brand promises of quality, reliability and performance."

The key features of this resistive touch controller IC are,
4 wire, 5 wire, and 8 wire analog resistive
Serial communications ports: SPI, I2C, UART serial interfaces
128 Bytes of user EEPROM
Operating Voltage: 3.3 to 5.0 volts ±5%
Current consumption:
Standby Sleep Current: <1uA
Operating "No touch" Current: 3.0mA typ.
Operating "Touch" Current: 17mA typ
Touch Modes: Off, Stream, Down, Up, and more.
Touch Coordinate Report Rate: 140 reports per second typ.
Need only few external components of ceramic capacitors and resistors
The range of embedded system and portable consumer electronic products and applications suggested include consumer (mobile communication devices, Personal Digital Assistants, Global Positioning Systems, media players, printers), medical (patient-monitoring equipment), industrial (kiosks, touch-screen monitors, portable instruments, point-of-sale terminals), and automotive electronics (navigation systems), among others.

AR1000 Development Kit with AR1000 development board and other necessary tools and docs are available from Microchip


Package:
AR1000: 20-pin QFN, SOIC and SSOP package

Price:
AR1000: Each $1.15 for 10k pieces.
Development kit at $99.99

Availability: Now
For more details visit www.microchipdirect.com.

To know more on this product and also to learn the basics of resistive touch panel sensing, download the datasheet from microchip website at URL,
http://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/41393A.pdf