Cypress introduces new TrueTouch touchscreens for low-cost phones

Cypress Semiconductor Corp introduced the TMA140 TrueTouch controllers for lower-cost mobile phones, today. The new family offers high-performance touchscreen control, including multi-finger support and best-in-class Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) for screens of upto five inches. The new controllers also support Cypress’s patent-pending Charger Armor feature, which use adaptive frequency hopping and other techniques to prevent false touches, due to excessive noise from a charger. The TMA140 sensor family is available today from Cypress in either 36-pin or 48-pin QFN packages.

Cheaper phones on the way

The new TMA140 family delivers high performance multi-touch capabilities on a feature phone budget. The low-power family offers better than 0.5-mm accuracy, delivers gesture capability, works flawlessly with Android and is now in mass production. TMA140 was designed to work with SLIM, Cypress’s Single Layer Independent Multi-touch sensor. SLIM is a true single-substrate, single layer ITO touchscreen sensor.  Unlike competitive solutions, it requires no additional insulation layers or bridges. This reduces the cost of traditional multi-touch sensors by roughly 40 percent, and also greatly reduces the thickness of the sensor module. TMA140 and SLIM have created the world’s lowest cost multi-touch solution in the market, making multi-touch affordable for feature phones. “By delivering a high-performance solution for the lower-cost phone market, Cypress is offering our customers a chance to shine versus their competition in very high volume markets,” said John Carey, Director of TrueTouch Marketing at Cypress.

Smartphones are no longer for the elite and enthusiast crowd, as many budget Android phones that we've comes across recently have proven just the opposite. Touchscreen technology is also improving and and it's only a matter of time time, before resistive screens are phased out altogether. Cypress' new technology is a step in that direction and very soon, 'feature phones' may be a thing of the past.