2012 ACE Awards Ultimate Products: Human-machine interface technology
EDN staff -- EDN, February 5, 2012
Below are the finalists for the Human-machine interface technology category of the 2012 ACE Awards Ultimate Products. After reviewing the finalists, cast your vote here. The voting deadline is February 24.We will announce the winners March 27 at a cocktail reception in San Jose during DESIGN West. Tickets to the event are available. See www.ubm-ace.com for additional information.
AS3911 NFC reader IC, austriamicrosystems
There are key customer needs on the infrastructure side that the AS3911 addresses with completely unique features: Automatic antenna tuning - The customer does not have to do any manual trimming in production or in the field (particularly important in challenging environments and when objects such as mobile phones are brought into the field); Capacitive wakeup - The customer can enjoy 5 uA of current consumption, compared with 10 mA when sensing every 100 ms, prolonging battery life; 1W of output power - For standard EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and VISA) applications, certain field volumes and strength, or applications reading cards, require a lot of power (crypto). All other readers need an external booster circuit. With our low impedance drivers we can get up to 1W of output power with very little loss, meaning we meet the EMV requirements and safely read crypto cards without the additional cost or complexity; VHBR (very high bit rate) - The AS3911 is the first reader on the market to implement this on silicon; EMV error handling on chip - This capability is integrated, meaning the customer does not need to do the substantial effort of handling this in an external micro.
EZ-USB FX3 controller, Cypress Semiconductor
The Gen4 family delivers built-in 10V Tx to drive the touch panel at 10V. Because SNR is directly proportional to the voltage at which the panel is driven, this feature allows Cypress to offer nearly four times the SNR of the next closest competitor. Gen4’s patent-pending Display Armor offers immunity to noise from every type of display, even low-cost noisy displays, such as ACVCOM LCDs. This feature allows touchscreen designers to make their products thinner by removing the air gap between the display and the sensor, and also less expensive by removing the shield layer in the sensor. In addition, the Gen4 product family offers a refresh rate of 400 Hz and has the unique ability to scan a capacitive touch panel at 1,000 Hz. This level of performance is enabled by the 32-bit ARM Cortex core. The Gen4 family enables unlimited touch performance, while providing linearity of 0.2 mm and power consumption of 2 mW. A deep-sleep mode draws only 1.8 uW. The Gen4 family also offers a waterproofing functionality that allows products to meet IP-67 standards; 1-mm stylus support for Asian character sets and accurate handwriting capture; and hover sensing to provide mouseover-like features and true fingernail or thick-glove support in mobile devices.
Xtrinsic capacitive and resistive touch sensing platform, Freescale Semiconductor
Xtrinsic’s capacitive and resistive touch sensing platform (CRTOUCH) enables resistive touch screens to handle basic gesture recognition. CRTOUCH also allows the addition of up to four capacitive electrodes to your system, all packaged on a 5 x 5 mm, lead-free 32-pin QFN. It supports 4- and 5-wire touch screens and communicates over UART and IIC communication protocols. CRTOUCH combines 4- and 5-wire resistive screen controllers with basic gesture recognition and up to four capacitive touch sensing electrodes, all encompassed in a single integrated circuit, allowing the implementation of both technologies, reducing space, software-development cost, and time to market.
LDS700x touchscreen controller ICs, Integrated Device Technology
The IDT LDS7000 and LDS7001 are high-performance, multitouch, full-resolution touch screen controller ICs featuring up to 30 and 35 sensor channels, respectively. Both controllers operate at a speedy 8-ms data rate for quick response to touch inputs to improve the user’s experience and enable advanced applications that require fast response times. The IDT LDS7000 family’s proprietary algorithms eliminate undesired multitouch ghosting, providing accurate individual X and Y coordinates in dual touch mode, a critical requirement for customers using host-interpreted custom gestures to differentiate their end product. The devices’ analog front-end design provides a high level of noise-rejection performance that negates the need for a separate touch screen shield layer for most applications, lowering the overall solution cost even further. IDT’s LDS7000 and LDS7001 are optimized for the company’s proprietary single-layer, multitouch projected capacitive touch screen technology. This new touch screen technology and controller solution revolutionized the market by offering a true single-layer solution, yet still maintaining full multitouch capability. The result is a lower-cost total solution that does not sacrifice features or performance. Typical applications include mobile handsets, personal navigation devices, and handheld gaming platforms with screen sizes up to five inches.
MoveTV, Movea
The future of TV and home entertainment is changing dramatically. The traditional design of a remote control with four directional control buttons is being replaced by a new generation of motion-enabled remotes that provide not only pixel-accurate cursor positioning to rapidly navigate through menus but also motion-enabled interactivity for gaming without consoles. Movea’s MoveTV technology is being adopted as the de facto standard by leading remote-control manufacturers and system providers for this next generation of motion remotes that is changing the way people interact with their home-entertainment systems via the new paradigm of a motion-based human-machine interface. The pioneering success of motion could be spread out to encompass set-top boxes, IPTV, and Internet connect TVs, but there is no unifying platform to bring ecosystem partners together and create a complete motion-enabled entertainment experience for the end user. MoveTV builds on Movea’s extensive knowledge in the use of motion as well as its relationships with different ecosystem partners to create a complete solution for deploying and monetizing motion services across the entire interactive TV environment.
Cast your vote here to honor excellence in engineering.
Click here to view all the 2012 ACE Awards Ultimate Products finalists.
