Atmel Low-power Microcontroller Platforms Accelerate Designs with Enhanced QTouch Development Suite

Designers continue to demand more integrated software solutions with additional functionality so they can develop a proof-of-concept design more rapidly. By providing the power of Atmel's QTouch Studio suite directly into a developer software package, designers now have a full library of touch options, including buttons, sliders and wheels, to include early on in their design stage. Atmel's QTouch Studio development module is available to CAD design vendors to be fully integrated into their solutions.

Offering an integrated touch solution platform using Atmel's AVR microcontrollers in Altium Designer makes a great deal of sense for designers seeking to innovate, and addresses the growing customer demand to offer more touch capability in hardware designs, said Martin Harris, Vice President EMEA at Altium. And the customer/partner relationship between Atmel and Altium is a natural fit for both of us.

This integration of Atmel's deep knowledge of touch and physical sensor design with our unified development platform Altium Designer offers the easiest and fastest touch development solution on the market today, saving hours in implementing touch structures in hardware. In addition, the intelligent data model created in the Altium Designer platform makes the step to enterprise systems and the integration into the production processes an easy one to make. We are very much looking forward to cooperating closely with Atmel in this area, Harris concluded.

Atmel's QTouch Suite is a bundle that includes the QT600 development kit and QTouch Studio, AVR Studio® and QTouch Library software package for AVR microcontroller design.

Atmel strives to be a company that makes the design flow process as easy and effortless as possible for our designers, said Jon Kiachian, sr. director of touch products for Atmel Corporation. By offering our QTouch sensor generation software into various CAD software programs, designers can now complete in minimal time and add touch capability early in the design flow. Previously, designers added this capability at the end of the design, not in the early prototyping stages.

We will continue to integrate our products and tools into all levels of the design flow to ultimately develop a simplified design flow - similar to a hardware 'plug-n-play' experience, Kiachian continued.