"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.

Altium has announced a technology partnership with Atmel to co-develop an integrated solution combining Atmel's Qtouch Studio, a touch sensor configuration tool, and Altium's electronics design solution Altium Designer. Brokered and negotiated in Europe, the partnership is worldwide in scope. 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 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.

For Altium Designer is a free 30-day evaluation version available. The Touch Sensor Module for Atmel AVR controllers will be included in the next release of Altium Designer.