Atmel has released a touch switch touch and slider chip, aimed at portable devices - the first product from Quantum Research Group since Atmel acquired the Southampton-based company in March.

Quantum, which is to retain its UK base, is in the process of moving its touch control products over to Atmel processors. "Design and support is currently in Southampton,” marketing director Stephan Thaler told EW. “There are no plans to move, we are actually hiring.”

Dubbed AT42QT2160, the first device can control up to 16 individual touch keys, and have a slider using between 2 and 8 of the touch key channels with up to 256 positions.

On top of the touch functions, the chip can also PWM control up to 11 LEDs 

Through its underlying capacitive touch sensing technology, the chip provides spread-spectrum modulation and filtering algorithms to improve EMI performance, lifetime calibration, and user-defined sensitivity thresholds for individual keys.

Adjacent key suppression, squashes signals present from nearby keys so that only intended keys register a touch.

Three I/O pins and eight output pins, the same that provide LED drive, are also available for other duties following commands over the serial bus.

To save system power, the chip provides a wake-up function that can wake the host or other system components over I2C, or a dedicated output pin, when pre-defined input levels are reached.

Touch button sensor electrodes of arbitrary size above 6x6mm and any shape can be used.

Usually formed from PCB copper, the pads can operate through 3mm of glass and 2.5mm of plastic. The chip has already been designed in, to a portable music player yet to be launched.

Supply range is 1.8 to 5.5V and samples are available now in a 4x4mm 28pin QFN package.

See interview with Hal Philipp, founder on Quantum Research