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 will be 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 added to the schematics and PCB layout.
Up until now the design time for a complex wheel was up to three days and any changes caused complete redesigns. Altium’s Designer enables any changes to bedone 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. "Our QTouch Studio demonstrates how much easier it is 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.”
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