Atmel Capacitive Touchscreens For Netbooks

Atmel is boasting about it’s new capacitive screen technology, maXTouch, which they are claiming is the next generation in touch technology.

Unlimited touch points on a surface, fast response times, better power
consumption (less than 1.8mW). Screen sizes up to 10.2” can be supported by a single chip (5 x 5mm in size), so required space is much less.

Touch can be performed by stylus, fingernails and gloves.

Now that’s all great and it will be coming to a whole range of devices but all I’m interested is if it will be coming to netbooks and it seems they do have that in mind. The mXT224 controller chip supports displays of up to 10.2” which seems to be suited to netbooks.

There are a bunch of videos showing off the technology on the Atmel site.

If you remember, there’s also the “Crystal Touch” capacitive displays from Ocular which is also another promising technology for our netbooks.