Atmel’s dominance of the capacitive touch screen controller market

Contributed by Jerico Garcia and Sam Thumm

2010 and 2011 have seen a rise in popularity in consumer electronics devices like tablets, smartphones, and e-book readers. Many of these hot, new products also feature a relatively new way for consumers to engage with the user interface: touch screens. One manufacturer benefitting greatly from the rise in popularity of touch screens has been Atmel, with capacitive touch solutions being Atmel’s runaway winner in growth performance last year.

In its first year of production alone, Atmel’s maXTouchTM touch screen controller product line cornered $140 million in revenues, and contributed more than 15% to its overall microcontroller product segment (2010 revenues of $892.3 million). This contributed to a remarkable increase in Atmel’s microcontrollers business segment by 16% between December 2009 and 2010 (Figure 1).

via Atmel’s dominance of the capacitive touch screen controller market » Technology Blog » Chipworks.