Flexible touchscreens open doors to innovative designs

Flexible touchscreens open doors to innovative designs

Bringing touch to curved and edgeless surfaces

BY MARIEL VAN TATENHOVE
Director of Touch Materials
Atmel
www.atmel.com

Young people today don’t really know a world without touchscreens. Children are used to interfaces that respond to a touch of their fingertips, and teens are adept at texting, Web surfing and downloading apps from smartphones and tablets. Over the last few years, the rapid consumer adoption of touch-enabled devices has changed the touchscreen environment significantly. As a result, the industry is experiencing phenomenal growth in the adoption of touch sensors, which are required in every touchscreen.

Fig. 1: New touch-enabled product designs made possible by flexible touch sensors.

With this growth in adoption, device manufacturers and suppliers are realizing that today’s touch sensors have limitations in terms of supporting the increased requirements for touch-enabled products. For example, current touch sensors do not have the flexibility to be applied to curved surfaces. They also do not allow engineers to embed functionality across the entire flat surface of a touchscreen. However, new touch sensors utilizing innovative materials that break through these limitations are emerging.

Atmel, a leading provider of microcontroller and touch solutions, has introduced a flexible, film-based touch sensor that helps overcome today’s technology limitations to enable new design possibilities and better performance for touch-enabled products.

Bringing touch to curved and edgeless surfaces

Due to the unique properties of its underlying fine-line metal (FLM) technology, Atmel’s XSense™ flexible touch sensor has a number of benefits including narrow (or no) borders, significantly smaller flexible printed circuit (FPC) bond pad dimensions due to extremely fine alignment tolerances, and better linearity translating into a more accurate and precise touch experience. Additionally, the sheet resistance of the XSense sensor is significantly less than that of traditional touch sensors, resulting in tangible mechanical design benefits including larger touch displays as well as better noise immunity and battery life. This means designers can now develop thinner, lighter touchscreens that will have better touch response than traditional touch sensors.

But most exciting is the flexibility of the XSense material, which will allow design engineers to integrate touchscreens in a wider range of form factors, from edgeless applications to curved surfaces. Product designs that had previously only been imagined—think curved areas on white goods, curved consoles in cars, sport watches, calculators and much more (see Figure 1)—are now made possible.

With these new form factors, end users can experience a richer touch experience including faster touch response time and accurate touches every time. ■