The Rise of Touch Panels

With the rise of technology, a variety of information electronic products has become an indispensable tool of modern life. Light, thin, short, and small have become the major characteristics of new generation of electronic products. Meanwhile, information and communications have become increasingly diversified. Human touch panel is the new star in the technology industry, which will write a glorious page in the Information Technology history. 
   
Touch panel removes the communication obstacle between end users and electronic products. Touch panel also provides the friendly human-machine interface (Human-Machine Interface, HMI), and infuses more humanity and warmth into the modern technology.

Apple Inc. launched the first generation of iPhone in early 2007. It has opened the opportunity of applying touch panels to consumer electronics. Apple's iPhone used “multi-point touch” (Multi-Touch) technology - the main feature that operates with fingers instead of a mobile phone keyboard or stylus. Due to this humane interface, end users will greatly benefit from the convenient electronic products in the future.

Touch panels are mainly used on mobile phones, portable navigation devices, portable video games, and UMPC (Ultra-mobile PC). These four products have undergone huge market growth, thus provides more than 35% of the Compound Annual Growth Rate for touch panels.

      The Basic Principles of Touch Panel

According to different types of materials, design, and technology, touch panels can detect accurate locations and make signals with the change of voltage, current, light source, and acoustic principle. Signals become command based on the design process. The command communicates the host computer through the control interface. The structure of touch panel can be divided into three main parts: panel, control system and software. Control system and software calculate the touched location, send the command to the control system, then the control system sends the response back to the command.

Touch panels consist of four different types of technologies:
(1) Resistance Touch Panel
(2) Capacitive Touch Panel
(3) Sound Wave Touch Panel
(4) Infrared Touch Panel

ASTC's product lines mainly focus on capacitive touch panels. Based on the original single-sided single-layer structure (a single glass), we currently provide three products:
(1) Type I: not support handwriting recognition
(2) Type II: support handwriting recognition and for multi-point operation
(3) Type III: Fixed-touch button

The advantages of Capacitive over Resistance Touch Panels include:
• The surface glass and LCD are more scratch resistant.
• Rigid films tend to be more smooth and reliable.