Altium and Atmel in touch sensor technology partnership

Brokered and negotiated in Europe, the partnership is worldwide in scope. "We are excited to be creating the industry’s first native touch sensor development solution," said Martin Harris, Vice President EMEA, Altium. "With Atmel and Altium, engineers can reduce design time by up to 90%. These productivity improvements will help companies compete and focus on developing product differentiation, instead of wasting time on inefficient design processes. "This extension to the world of touch sensitive product development is a natural one because of Altium's unified approach to electronics design, where the entire design process is managed using a single data model and a single application. And Altium's electronics design data management features now also embrace the touch sensitive design aspects as well." Demand for touch-operated interfaces is set to grow rapidly with touch control applications quickly finding their way into more designs. One major stumbling block has been the manual generation of the various touch sensors' complex shapes on the PCB, resulting often in hours of work for each revision. In Altium Designer, touch buttons, sliders and wheels can now be easily added to the schematics and PCB layout. The design time for a complex wheel was up to three days and any changes caused complete redesigns.