14 DAY TRIAL // NVIDIA seems to be signing deals left and right these days, and most of them have to do with the Tegra mobile platform rather than its GPU business.
The Santa Clara, California-based company has signed a collaboration with N-trig, through which the former gains rights to use the latter's DuoSense interface.
DuoSense is N-trig patented technology that gives devices a pen and multi-touch user interface that lets owners draw and sketch, take notes (handwriting recognition is present) and even do their homework directly on the pad.
The DirectTouch architecture is one of the DuoSense's primary assets. It offloads part of the touch panel processing to the CPU cores in the Tegra 3 4-PLUS-1 processor.
“With this partnership, we bring advanced active pen and multi-touch capabilities to the tablet market, providing the user with the smoothest and most precise experience possible,” said Amichai Ben-David, CEO of N-trig.
“The additional processing power provided by Tegra 3 allows device manufacturers to offer enhanced pen and multi-touch performance without increasing cost or power consumption.”
With this partnership, NVIDIA hopes to have an easier time of implementing touch-based hardware and user interfaces, all the while lowering power requirements.
What's more, since DuoSense supports all Android-based and Windows tablets (even Windows 8), as well as convertible devices, compatibility is not an issue either.
"We’re delighted to take our collaboration with N-trig to a new level in improving the touchscreen experience,” said Michael Rayfield, general manager of the mobile business at NVIDIA.
"The combination of DirectTouch with N-trig’s DuoSense user interface will enable device-makers to offer their customers unprecedented precision for active pen and multi-touch processing."
On a related note, NVIDIA has signed other deals involving the Tegra 3 processor, the most relevant of which is the one with Renesas and GCT, for adding 4G/LTE support to this same mobile platform.