We call this section GRAPEVINE because Stantum is headquartered in Bordeaux, France, known worldwide for the Bordeaux variety wine. The way we’ve been using the word in Touch Point reflects how our customers first learned about our multi-touch technology. In this edition, however, the word grapevine signifies growth and the ways our new partner/customer, Sitronix (see the announcement in our IN THE NEWS section), will help grow the multi-touch market with its own special technology.

Weber Chien
Vice President, LCD Group, Sitronix

About Sitronix

Based in Taiwan, Sitronix is a global leader of LCD driver and SoC IC design. The company was founded in 1998 and has been listed as a publicly traded company on the Taipei stock exchange since Dec. 2003. With 350 employees worldwide, Sitronix provides services from R&D to sales and marketing of complete IC designs. They also offer information-related chipset design, IC design for consumer electronics, and total solutions for system applications.

Why did you choose Stantum’s technology?

With the increasing demand for multi-touch since 2007, we decided to open a touch-panel controller division with a disruptive technology that would have a better price/performances ratio than capacitive without its limitations. Indeed, we found that not only is the market demand very high for handwriting recognition (requiring finger and stylus input which capacitive devices like the iPhone cannot feature) but that unlimited number of touches with a low latency is a must-have as well. Stantum’s pioneering and proven multi-touch approach is the only one providing these capabilities with good scalability and low power consumption. With the leading touch-panel vendors supporting Stantum’s technology, we are now part of an ecosystem ready for mass production and we now want to become a leading player in the global multi-touch controller IC market.

How have you implemented this technology?

Our first implementation will be a single-chip solution that allows driving multi-touch panels of up to 10.1 inches. Our strong experience in LCD driver ICs enabled us to design a very elegant solution, with unprecedented performance in terms of scanning system, DSP, and CPU, and with a small packaging that allows building chip-on-flex or even chip-on-glass solutions for simpler designs at lower production costs. Our solution can also support area and pressure detection to optimize the user interface. This allows three-dimensional multi-touch experience with vertical touch experience. We are very proud of this new chip that our engineers designed – with strong IP and software support from Stantum – and which is raising a lot of interests among OEMs.




Sitronix's ST9RM01 chip on glass