Altium and Atmel integrate touch sensor applications development with board design
EMBEDDED WORLD 2010, Nuremberg, Germany, March 2, 2010 – Altium has announced a technology partnership with Atmel® to co-develop an integrated solution combining Atmel's Qtouch® Studio, a touch sensor configuration tool, and Altium's electronics design solution Altium Designer.
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. With Altium Designer, touch wheels can be done within minutes and changes can be implemented at the touch of a few buttons at any time in the design process, with schematic information being updated true to Altium's unified concept.
"Atmel's goal is to make touch sensor technology as straightforward as possible for design engineers," said Dag Arne Braend, AVR® Tools Director of Atmel Corporation. "Atmel’s QTouch Studio demonstrates exactly just that by making it easier for engineers to implement touch functionality into their designs. To help designers work with our QTouch Studio in various design tools, we worked with Altium to integrate our solutions into their user-friendly Altium Designer. We were impressed with the speedy implementation of the QTouch data into the Altium Designer workflow and look forward to helping our designers bring more touch-enabled products to market."
Both companies are demonstrating this comprehensive and user-friendly solution at Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany.
Further information
For more information about Altium Designer and a free 30-day evaluation version, visit http://www.altium.com/altiumdesigner.
The Touch Sensor Module for Atmel AVR controllers will be included in the next release of Altium Designer.
For more information about the Atmel QTouch Suite, free downloads and their QT600 development kit, visit http://www.atmel.com/qtouchsuite.
ENDS
Contacts:
Alan Smith Altium Limited
+61 2 8622 8109
alan.smith@altium.com
Gabriele Amelunxen
PRismaPR
+49 8106 247 233
info@prismapr.com
Monika Cunnington
PRismaPR (UK)
+44-1462 640 779
monika@prismapr.com
About Altium
Altium Limited (ASX:ALU) creates electronics design software based on the belief that anyone who wants to create electronic products that make a difference should be able to do so. Altium’s unified electronics design environment links all aspects of electronics product design in a single application that is priced to be as affordable as possible. This helps electronics designers break down barriers to innovation, harness the latest devices and technologies, manage their projects across broad design "ecosystems" and create connected, intelligent designs.
Founded in 1985, Altium has headquarters in Sydney, and operates worldwide. For more information, visit www.altium.com.
Altium, Altium Designer and LiveDesign, and their respective logos, are trademarks or registered trademarks of Altium Limited, or its subsidiaries. All other registered or unregistered trademarks mentioned in this release are the property of their respective owners, and no trademark rights to the same are claimed.
About Atmel
Atmel is a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of capacitive touch solutions, microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency (RF) components. Leveraging one of the industry's broadest intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, Atmel is able to provide the electronics industry with complete system solutions focused on consumer, industrial, security, communications, computing and automotive markets. Atmel® , AVR® and QTouch® are registered trademarks of Atmel Corporation.
