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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.

Both companies are demonstrating this comprehensive and user-friendly solution at Embedded World in Nuremberg, Germany.