Why Alterix?

Alterix Ltd based in Cambridge, UK, is now offering a Windows 8 certified electronic solution for large size capacitive multi-touch digitisers - helping to replace interactive whiteboards with modern multi-touch screen TVs.

Our development team has experience in developing challenging sensing solutions using Cortex microcontrollers

Alterix activities stems out from experience of working for a decade in the technology consultancy cluster based in Cambridge, UK

ARM Cortex microcontrollers offer multiple timers which can be synchronized together to create a complex state machine. This state machine is used to control the scanning of the touch sensor grid and the accumulation of the raw data

We have used a similar approach to develop sensing electronics:

STM32F303 part was used to develop electronics for absolute rotary sensor with a resolution of 0.002 degree and update rate of 8µs
STM32F373 part was used to develop electronics for absolute linear sensor with a resolution of 1µm and update rate of 32µs
These designs are licensed to two industrial sensor companies

Our long term goal

There is currently an established worldwide market worth more than $2 billion per annum for interactive whiteboards

Being exposed to tablet PCs, customers are expecting the new generation of multi-touch interactive whiteboard products

Scaling up the digitizer size is not straightforward - technical certification requirements are challenging even at 20" diagonal size

Industry commentators agree that, with the falling cost of TV panels, whiteboards will routinely become based on them

However at present there are no ideal solutions to the challenge of making large TV panels touch sensitive

The search is now on for a new touch sensing technology capable of working effectively with large panels bigger than 70"