For those who install and manage their own notebooks, Synaptics is a name that should be familiar since quite some number of notebook on the market uses their solution for touchpad. Synaptics provides more than just chips or panel technology, they provide complete solutions that include sensors, controller chips, device driver, touch gestures logics and etc. And in the field of touch panels for smart handheld device, Synaptics holds around 30% of the market share.
In the total solutions provided by Synaptics, apart from hardware design, most valuable part is the ability to provide device drivers support for multiple OS, such as Symbian, RIM, Android, Linux, Windows Phone and etc. And because products can be specifically customized with different gesture logic for customers, allow customer to create product differentiation in their user interface, hence different customers can have dramatically different styles of operating logics and gesture control under one unified platform.
AT the moment, Synaptics provide five different ClearPad touch solutions for touch control displays. The entry level Series 1 provides general smartphone with single point touch gesture support, Series 2 provides dual-point touch gesture support. And from Series 3 up, including Series 4 and Series 7, supports multi-touch gestures. Series 3 and Series 4 are made for smart phones, and Series 7 for tablet or similar products with the need for larger screen size, up to 11.6".
For traditional touchpad, Synaptics' most noticeable progress this year is to provide solution to satisfy the demand for better multi-touch responsiveness in notebook, largely caused by the increase in size for notebook touchpad, by putting forward the use of I2C to place the traditional PS2 interface, so bandwidth would be sufficient for multi-touch. As for the design progress for touchpad with invisible buttons, Synaptics strive to improve these kind of touchpad so the same level of feedback can be provided anywhere within the touchpad area, hoping to provide customer with more compactly designed touchpads.