Synaptics Unveils New Family of Touch-Enabled Chips

Synatpics, best known for its touchpad technology, has announced three new capacitive touchscreen platforms for phones, portable media players, and other mobile devices: The Clearpad 1000 Series, Clearpad 2000 Series, and Clearpad 3000 Series. Clearpad 1000 Series is a low-cost, mass market, borderless touchscreen designed for entry-level and mid-range devices. It can only recognize a single touch at a time, but allows users to execute several gestures including Single Tap, Double Tap, Tap & Hold, Flick, and Press. Moving up from it is the Clearpad 2000 Series ( a rebrand of Synaptics’ current “Clearpad”), which accepts two-finger inputs and is targetted at mid-range and high-end devices. It supports  Pinch and Pivot Rotate gestures. At the top of the heap is the Clearpad 3000 Series,  which pushes the touch technology envelope. The high-end chipset features 48 sensing channels and focused power management so devices woun’t chew through battery life. Designed for large screens up to 8 inches in size, it supports up to 10 finger simultaneous multi-touch. Unlike the other chipsets, the Clearpad 3000 is targetted for  handheld gaming systems and personal navigation devices. In a face to face demo, we saw a very simple Pong-like game that demonstrated how multi-finger input could allow two-players to game on one device. Clearly, the hard technology is in place; developers just have to create killer apps to support it.  Hopefully, there are some in the works as the Clearpad 1000 Series kits begin shipping to OEMs in August, while the Clearpad 3000 Series will begin shipping by the end of the year.