GlideSensor^®

Touch sensors are becoming increasing common on mobile phones, personal music players and many other electronic devices. Touch sensors are intuitive to use, extremely durable, reliable and allow for sleek and modern industrial designs. GlideSensor ®   from Cirque makes it easy to integrate touch input into your device.

Cirque’s GlideSensor touch input solutions are an extension of our proven GlidePoint ® touchpad technology being used everyday in millions of devices worldwide. Building on this expertise, GlideSensor ®  integrates touch sensor technology into a wide variety of devices and form factors. GlideSensor ®  touch sensors can take the form of traditional rigid panels, thin flexible films and irregular shapes.

GlideSensor ®   touch input can be placed behind and sense through most dielectric materials and can quickly be programmed to provide a variety of custom input functions, including:

• Text entry
  
• Button press
  
• Linear control
  
• Circular control
  
• Scrolling 
  

A range of standard GlideSensor ®   development modules are available from Cirque to allow for rapid development and evaluation of touch input solutions in your application. A complete GlideSensor ®   solution combines a low-power Cirque mixed mode ASIC controller and a touch input sensor. Interface to the host microcontroller is through a SPI or I²C protocol.

GlideSensor ®   now provides a flexible tool set allowing OEM developers to rapidly design and integrate custom touch input solutions into today’s consumer electronic products Cirque’s   GlideSensor ®  Development Kit   provides the tools and documentation necessary to introduce the capabilities of GlideSensor ® touch input and quickly evaluate, design, and integrate a touch solution in your product. Begin the process today!

GlideSensor ®   can be added to any phone by mounting the hidden touch sensor behind the mechanical buttons. Menu navigation is more intuitive using a touchpad to scroll and select. Text input is simplified by using a finger to write characters.

Cirque's Proprietary GlideSensor ®   technology and the mobile phone market are an ideal match. In 2006 GlideSensor became the first capacitive touch sensor to be used in a mobile phone and in January of 2007 Cirque was awarded a new patent relating to capacitive sensor use in a cell phone (See "Cirque Received broad patent coverage for Touchpad use in a Cell Phone")