Cypress Korea (Country Manager Young-do Lim, www.cypress.com ) announced the launch of a new Gen4 TrueTouch® controller targeting the rapidly growing tablet and ultrabook market.

The new CY8CTMA1036 device features 65 sense-I/Os, enabling perfect touchscreen performance for screens up to 12 inches. Like small-screen Gen4 devices, the new product addresses all noise sources—the biggest challenge encountered in touchscreen design—and delivers industry-leading performance across all categories, including the world's best signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and exceptional performance.

Gen4 also features the lowest active power consumption, superior tracking accuracy, and the fastest refresh rate, and provides full support for major mobile operating systems, including Win8 and Android. Additionally, the new CY8CTMA1036 utilizes a 32-bit ARM® Cortex™ core and provides 65 sensing I/O channels with support for up to 1036 nodes on-screen, which is 35% more than any other single-chip solution. These additional sensing channels are essential for greater sophistication and linearity, support for small fingers, and the ability to handle the problem of multiple fingers being held close together.

Cypress is receiving the same positive response from tablet manufacturers as it has in the mobile phone sector. Customers are pleased to apply the benefits of Gen4’s noise immunity, low power, and excellent performance to their tablet designs in a single-chip package. “We are currently sampling to various customers and expect to start shipping products by the end of this quarter,” said Lim Young-do, General Manager of Cypress Korea.

groundbreaking noise removal
The Gen4 family is designed from the ground up to deliver the world's best SNR in real-world applications. Gen4 is the first and only touchscreen IC to provide built-in 10V Tx to drive touch panels at 10V. Since SNR is directly proportional to the voltage at which the panel is driven, this feature enables Cypress to deliver nearly four times the SNR of its closest competitors in the future.

The Gen4 family raises the SNR standard as the first touchscreen devices designed to completely eliminate display noise in hardware. Gen4's patent-pending Display Armor™ feature provides superior noise immunity for all display types, even on noisy, low-cost displays such as ACVCOM LCDs.

This allows touchscreen designers to make products thinner by eliminating the air gap between the display and the sensor, as well as make them more affordable by removing the shielding layer from the sensor. The Display Armor feature also enables Gen4 to operate seamlessly with direct lamination, on-cell, and in-cell stack-up regardless of the display chemistry.

The world's fastest and lowest power touchscreen controller
In addition to excellent noise performance, the Gen4 platform offers the world's lowest active power consumption of 2 mW and a deep sleep mode that draws only 1.8 uW with a wake-up function via address matching on the COM port. Shortened battery life is a common issue for smartphones and other portable touchscreen devices, and Gen4 provides OEMs with another tool to help address this problem. The Gen4 family also boasts the industry's fastest refresh rate of 400Hz and possesses the unique ability to scan capacitive touch panels at 1,000Hz, all of which are industry-leading metrics. This level of performance is made possible by the 32-bit ARM® Cortex™ core at the heart of the Gen4 products. While enabling infinite touch performance, the Gen4 family delivers industry-leading accuracy and linearity of 0.2 mm.

In addition, the Gen4 product family offers features that only TrueTouch can deliver, including water resistance capable of meeting IP-67 standards. These unique features include Asian character settings, 1-mm stylus support for accurate handwriting capture, hover sensing to provide functions such as mouse rollover, and support for fingernails or thick gloves on mobile devices.

Cypress’s unique, patent-pending ability to dynamically switch between self-capacitive and mutual-capacitive sensing methods within an application enables these differentiating features. Cypress currently holds and has pending over 250 patents related to touchscreens. More details, including related videos, can be found at touch.cypress.com.

Cypress's Touchscreen Leadership
Cypress’s touch sensing portfolio, including both TrueTouch and CapSense® solutions, is the most extensive and widely adopted in the industry. The Gen4 product family is the latest addition to a series of first-in-one touchscreen products from Cypress, recognized as an industry leader in touch sensing. Such examples are as follows:

Cypress was the first company to deliver unlimited touch tracking capabilities.
Cypress was the first company to provide a true single-layer sensor solution to offer capacitive performance at a pressure-sensitive price.
- As with previous generation products, the new Gen4 product family is provided in the world's smallest CSP package to save space, which is important for mobile phones.
Cypress is the only company that provides self-contained and mutually capacitive sensing methods, which are still patent pending on the same chip, enabling the development of advanced features such as waterproofing, 1mm stylus support, and hovering capabilities without increasing material or space costs.
TrueTouch is designed to work with major mobile platforms, including Android and Windows® 8.