TouchNetix, an independent supplier of high performance projected capacitance touchscreens, has announced that Siemens Industrial Automation Division has selected its Multi-Touch Capacitive touchscreen technology for the new generation of Simatic industrial human machine interface (HMI) panels.
TouchNetix acted as the principal engineering partner, helping to define, design and supply best in class touch technology for the series of 15.6”, 18.5” and 21.5” HMI systems. The company’s brief was to help bring the advantages of full multi-touch performance to the Simatic HMI units while maintaining the robustness of the incumbent resistive touch technology.
The technology developed by TouchNetix, using a combination of sensor designs and manufacturing processes, is coupled with a custom driver board and firmware to enable a choice of digitiser or mouse input modes. The overall system outperforms all other currently available capacitive touchscreen offerings, providing flawless touch response even in high electromagnetic interference (EMI) conditions, where water is present, and when the application necessitates that the user wears gloves.
“As the market leader in Industrial Automation Systems, we needed to move beyond the existing state-of-the-art capacitive touch technology to meet our requirements and our timescales” said Silvio Rasek, product manager, Siemens Industrial Automation Division. “We engaged with TouchNetix because their track record of using existing technologies in new ways allowed us to meet our performance requirements with the lowest possible risk.”
“We are delighted that Siemens has chosen our technology to bring the multi-touch user experience to their HMI systems,” said Chris Ard, managing director of TouchNetix. “Our business philosophy is to enable our customers to deploy the best performing capacitive touch technology in their products for highly demanding applications in a way that is easy and which guarantees a successful outcome.”
