Touch design suite speeds up time to market

Design engineers looking to integrate touch functionality into their applications now have a new software tool to add to their arsenal to reduce their workloads and speed up the design process. Atmel Corp. says its QTouch Studio 4.3 is the first in the industry to support the complete touch design flow, allowing engineers to complete touch designs even without an expert level of understanding of the technologies.

QTouch Studio 4.3 features "Touch Validation Wizard," which helps engineers assess design quality by checking capacitance, noise levels and reference levels and by raising flags on possible design problems. Other key features include real-time tuning of the touch sensors, permanent storage of the tuned configuration into the flash memory, and debugging of the touch interface.

The tool also allows engineers to expand their sensor and manufacturing supply chain by qualifying their systems for multiple material suppliers or contract manufacturers during the touch design development or during production.

Atmel AVR 8- and 32-bit and ARM microcontroller devices support QTouch Studio 4.3, which can also be used with the Atmel touch evaluation and development kits such as the QT600.

The free software also features support for Microsoft Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.