SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Touch screen technology has been around for years.
But for the most part, the technology has been a bust, that is, until Apple Inc. rolled out the iPhone with its eye-popping touch screen feature. Instead of using a merchant part, Apple is said to have devised its own touch screen ASIC for the iPhone.
Still, prompted by the iPhone and other trends, chip makers are scrambling to expand or enter the touch screen IC market. This emerging merchant business is expected to be fierce, and, pardon the pun, touchy.
The capacitive touch screen and touch button controller segment is projected to hit 1.3 billion units by 2012, a 44 percent compounded annual growth rate, according to Gartner Inc.
''Capacitive touch screens are rapidly becoming common in mobile handsets, spurred by the success of the iPhone,'' said Amy Leong, an analyst with Gartner, at an event here.
''The next big 'touch' opportunity would be in personal computers,'' Leong said. ''In the past, capacitive touch technology has been widely used in touch pads for notebook PCs. However, manufacturers are now implementing capacitive touch technologies into PCs and PC peripherals in the form of touch screens, proximity touch-sensing buttons or sliders and multi-touch mouse pads.''
The key driver for the PC? ''A key trigger for the touch screen proliferation in the PC segment will be the availability of Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system,'' she said. ''Windows 7 is the first operating system optimized for multi-touch features.''
There are a number of touch-screen technologies: resistive, capacitive, surface acoustic wave, infrared and many others.
''There is no perfect touch technologies,'' Leong said. ''For the emerging PC touch market, there is no obvious technology winner yet. The capacitive touch technology appears to be the more mature one for the early adopters. However, the cost of the screen is increasingly more expensive with larger screen size. Therefore, for the main stream notebook PC screen size around 15 inches, it costs more than 3X of the standard screen cost today. Its high cost is opening doors to other competitive technologies such as the multi-touch resistive technology and optical technology.''
