Cypress Brings 1-mm Stylus Support to Capacitive Touchscreens

Stylus support has mostly been associated with resistive touchscreen technology, which detects the pressure applied thanks to a multi-layer screen. While this feature is useful, it has been outweighed, at least in some instances, by the vulnerability of resistive touch panels to scratches, as well as the poor sunlight visibility exhibited by such displays. As such, companies have started moving to capacitive touchscreens, but these displays either lack support of or only supported 3- to 4-mm styluses, limiting the level of interactivity and usability of such panels. This issue, however, seems to have finally been solved by Cypress.

The company has announced that its TrueTouch solution now accurately detects stylus tips with 1-mm accuracy, finally granting capacitive screens the advanced handwriting recognition and control of text entry that eluded them. As such, display makers now have more reason to transition to capacitive touch panels, seeing how the technology's main disadvantage, as proven by the video demonstration, is now gone.

“The unprecedented level of accuracy of our stylus support will enable us to transform a broad range of markets,” Dhwani Vyas, vice president of the User Interface Business Unit at Cypress, said. “Watching the video, you can clearly see the system level performance our TrueTouch technology delivers. TrueTouch combines the best of both worlds: 1 mm stylus support accurate enough to draw detailed characters, such as in traditional Chinese, along with the multitouch capability, transparency, scratch-resistance and all-around durability of capacitive touchscreens. I’m proud of the technical achievement of our team, and think many potential customers will be excited about this new capability.”

Cypress is demonstrating the 1-mm stylus support for capacitive touchscreens at the Mobile World Congress 2010, along with precision motion sensing technology for handsets and peripheral and mass storage controllers. The company is currently working with its customers and expects to make a stylus support module available by the second quarter of the ongoing year.