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."
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.
About Altium
Altium Limited (ASX:ALU) provides next generation electronics design software that breaks down the barriers to innovation. Altium’s unified electronics design environment links all aspects of electronics product design into one process, in a single application. This helps electronics designers 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, sales offices in the United States, Europe, China, and resellers in all other major markets. 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.