Synaptics develops human interface solutions for mobile computing, communications, and entertainment. The company’s technologies include touchscreens and touchpads for many devices, including notebook PCs, mobile phones, and remote controls. Some technologies developed by Synaptics include virtual scrollbars on touchpads, the ClearPad clear capacitive touchscreen sensor for mobile devices, and customizable gestures for touchpads.

To learn more about Synaptics and upcoming innovations in touch technologies for mobile devices and notebook PCs, we spoke with Ted Theocheung, Synaptics general manager of PC & digital home ecosystems, and Robyn Palmer, Synaptics product specialist for handheld business. Answers have been edited for clarity and space.

Q What is Synaptics’ specialty?

Ted: Synaptics specializes in human interaction with devices at the highest level—how you interface with types of hardware whether it is a phone, a PC, or some other digital or home device. At a high level, Synaptics provides touch interface technology. A lot of the technology has been based on capacitive touch technology. As a company, we don’t limit our technology to just capacitive solutions, but most of the offerings we have out on the marketplace today are capacitive.

Q How has Synaptics developed its niche?

Ted: Replacing the mouse is really where Synaptics got started, by developing the first touchpad back in 1995, which was implemented in the MacBook. It quickly carried over to the PC world and is now the standard. In the PC space, Synaptics has more than 70% market share for all notebook PCs, according to IDC. In netbooks, which have smaller touchpads that are harder to develop compared to notebooks, we have well over 90% market share. Today, capacitive technology is segmented into opaque solutions like the touchpad on your notebook and ClearPad, which is on the Google Nexus One or other touchscreen phones.

Q How has Synaptics’ touchscreen technology evolved over the years?

Ted: For touchscreen technology, the 1.0 era was replacing the mouse. The 2.0 era introduced gestures for zooming, pinching, and rotating. The 3.0 era is what we announced with the Scrybe technology, which allows you to do gesture workflows—complete tasks all through touch. There are some examples at Uscrybe.com. You can go to the Web site and download the Scrybe technology today. It’s simply a driver update to Synaptics touchpads. As you install the upgrade, it lets you know whether your PC has a Synaptics product.

What we’ve tried to do is work throughout the ecosystem to deliver a more complete and better experience in your applications. To give you more examples, if you use Windows Live Photo Gallery with the gestures for touching and opening photos, you can rotate, zoom, and use an enhancement called zoom-around point. If you have ever played with a GPS, where you say zoom in, it always zooms in at the center. With zoom-around point, all you do is point at the location and pinch, almost all in one motion. You can then zoom in around that location.

Q What types of technologies has Synaptics developed recently?

Ted: For notebook PCs, touchscreens are really cool and sexy, but current market penetration for notebooks with touchscreens is only about 1%. Touchscreens add a lot of expense to notebooks, commanding an additional $100—You’re not going to get double-digit or 100% market penetration in the immediate future.

But notebook PCs with touchpads have essentially 99% market penetration. The opportunity here is delivering similar touchscreen experiences through a touchpad with the technologies such as Scrybe and our gesture suite. We have incorporated improvements in gesture detection, and we also have the ability to eliminate accidental activation; when you put your palm down on the touchpad and your cursor moves, for example. Our new image sensor raises the bar in terms of what our core hardware technology can do.

Robyn: We also do a lot of usability testing and concept prototyping. The Fuse concept phone demonstrates the types of technologies manufacturers might incorporate for a very good user experience. Fuse includes capacitive sensors on its sides, so you can do things like squeeze the phone and slide your fingers along the sides of the phone for different input technologies. We’ve also included touchpad-like sensors on the back of the phone. We thought that when you hold your phone, your finger naturally is on the back, so you can do things like scroll through email and use one hand without blocking the main display.

Q What are some of the biggest challenges that Synaptics has faced?

Ted: One of the interesting challenges in this space is the perception that touch technology seems to incorporate a little bit of black magic—but there is actually a science behind it. People are different; they have dry hands or moist hands, and there are all different sizes of fingers. A lot of the science has to do with tuning the touch technology for the specific application. We deliver the best solutions when we work tightly with the OEMs and get involved in the design cycle early on to provide feedback on the challenges of optimizing touch technology.

PCs and mobile phones are used all around the world in different environments, not just in a lab environment where someone conceives ideas. We’ve been able to capture how touch technology works around the world in various environments and tune that capability for a specific device. There are many challenges that new OEMs face as touch technology pervades other types of devices.

Robyn: Synaptics has done a lot of work to make sure its solutions meet the needs of the customers. For example, the types of materials that we work with are very numerous, especially in the touchpad space. And for every device, there’s a different amount of noise, electrostatic discharge, and other variables to consider. So we really work hard to customize and manage all of these things that our customers may not think about when they are incorporating a sensor into their devices.

Q What are Synaptics’ most popular products and features?

Robyn: For mobile devices, our ClearPad solution is the hot product. For smartphone manufacturers who want to incorporate dynamic displays with no buttons, touchscreen is the obvious solution. We also do things like under-plastic capacitive buttons for phones, multimedia-on-demand buttons on the exterior of phones, and smaller touchpad-like solutions for navigation areas. We are very creative in how devices can incorporate capacitive sensing.

Ted: On the PC side, there are many manufacturers that have been able to gain success with Synaptics technologies. For example, the Dell Adamo XPS—an ultrathin laptop—uses the latest technology available today from Synaptics as its primary pointing device.

QWhat are some examples of current mobile devices that use Synaptics technologies?

Robyn: Some of our recent U.S. announcements include the Google Nexus One, the HTC Droid, and the HTC Hero. Outside the U.S., the HTC Anthem phones shipping in Europe are popular for social media, and the Samsung H1 and M1 phones also use Synaptics technology. We have a very strong presence in Japan; many of the phones offered by NTT DoCoMo include our touchscreen sensor, and in China, the Meizu M8 is a very popular Android-based device.

Ted: We are also involved with technologies for remote controls, such as the Logitech Harmony 900 universal remote and DISH Network’s HD DuoDVR ViP 922 remote. Instead of scrolling or pushing buttons many times or hunting and pecking on a fake keyboard to navigate, the remotes incorporate touch technologies. And in the digital home space, Synaptics technologies are used on the Barnes & Noble Nook ereader.

by Carmen Carmack