Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Microchip announces industry's lowest power projected-capacitive touch controllers

Microchip Technology Inc., a leading provider of microcontroller, mixed-signal, analog and Flash-IP solutions, has announced a new family of projected-capacitive touch controllers – the MTCH6102, with industry-leading low-power performance.  These turnkey projected-capacitive controllers make it easy for designers to add contemporary touch and gesture interface designs to cost-sensitive applications.

This MTCH6102 facilitates design integration of capacitive scanning for touch screens and touch pads including 11 single-finger gestures to swipe, scroll or double tap.  The MTCH6102 enables flexible, scalable solutions to support PCB, ITO or FPC sensors up to 15 channels.  It supports cover lenses up to 3 mm plastic and 5 mm glass and configurable sleep/idle frame rates to optimise for most power budgets with active mode as low as 12 µA.  Microchip offers its free Configuration Utility to allow designers to make fast customisations.  Microchip also provides designers with the firmware library for further optimisation and control if needed.

The MTCH6102 family serves a wide range of applications in the consumer-electronic (e.g., remote controls, gaming devices, wearable devices such as headphones, watches, fitness wristbands, and track pads), and automotive markets (e.g., automotive interior controls and control panels), among others.

"Microchip's turnkey, low-cost controller offers the lowest power projected-capacitive touch solution in the industry to maximise battery life in cost-sensitive applications," said Fanie Duvenhage, director of Microchip's Human-Machine Interface Division.  "The MTCH6102 provides developers with a flexible touch-sensing solution for smaller touch areas to optimise common constraints of size, power and cost that are critical to applications such as wearable devices, remote controls, gaming devices and track pads."

Development Support
The MTCH6102 is supported by Microchip's Low-Power Projected-Capacitive Touch Pad Development Kit (part # DM160219), and is available to order today.

Availability
The MTCH6102 is available for production orders today. It is supplied in 10,000-unit quantities. For additional information, contact any Microchip sales representative or authorised worldwide distributor, or visit Microchip's website at http://www.microchip.com/get/TU7M.