Atmel is expanding its engineering team at Whiteley near Southampton as the semiconductor company sees growing demand for its touch controller technology.
The UK team is a global centre of competence for the semiconductor supplier’s touch control software system development and applications support.
“The touch-controller business is currently seeing double-digit percentage growth and so we need to increase the size of our engineering teams,” Iqbal Sharif, engineering director at Atmel told Electronics Weekly.
“This touch-control engineering centre is unique in the UK,” said Sharif.
Atmel has a team of engineers at the facility carrying out firmware development for the firm’s touch controller products and hardware systems development.
The team also provides product support for Atmel’s global sales force with applications engineering activities. “We expect to increase the size of the team by 30% in 2012,” said Sharif.
The software development activities include touch control algorithm development, for example looking at the area of noise suppression.
There are also teams working on embedded digital signal processor programming in C and mathematical modelling using Matlab. A third activity is system-level hardware design including PCB design.
Atmel’s touch controllers are designed into smartphones and tablet PCs from manufacturers such as Sony, HTC, Nokia and Acer.
An area of interest for Atmel is developing multi-touch technology for large screen formats and it has created a reference design based around Nvidia’s Tegra 2 mobile processor and Atmel’s maXTouch mXT1386 touch controller.
Atmel’s chipset will support up to 10 simultaneous touches. The aim is to support touchscreens up to 15in for tablet PCs and netbooks.
The touch controller activities at Whiteley have grown out of Atmel’s acquisition of UK firm Quantum Research Group back in 2008.
www.atmel.com