 Welcome to CES 2020. This is a micro-trip technology booth. My name is Wayne Freeman and we're going to show you all about smart connected and secure technology. We've got lots of demos around here. In fact let's talk to this gentleman here about the smart steering wheels. This is Eric Boxy from micro-trip and what I'm showing is a new automotive technologies for HMI. There's two technology trends that we're addressing over here. We'll start out with the first one which is right in the center over here. As you can see the screen sizes are getting much larger. 8 and 10 is not standard anymore. You're talking about 15, 17, 19 inches, right? When those sizes get really large you actually lose a lot of real estate that you have for mechanical buttons and encoders. So what we've done is given an ability to bring the encoders into the display. As an example we actually have a passive knob over here that's part of the active display and there's really no electronics behind it. It's just a mechanical contraption as you can see. You hear it right on the screen and you're able to get really good encoding out of the system. So is that capacity of technology? The solution here itself inherently is capacitive in nature but this here is just another mechanical passive piece that you have geared on top. It's taking advantage of the capacitance in order to figure out what the encoding angles are. What we also have over here is a display on knob. An alternative to a knob on display we have another way of actually implementing a knob. I display it over a knob kind of a solution. You can touch on it and control various features. Is there so you do the technology that's to do with the knob or the display? This is actually still capacitive. Everything here is still capacitive in nature. We're using one of our MXT devices in order to develop this solution. What's happening with these displays? The other technology that we were going to show is the trend that automotive guys are looking at developing ultra-wide sensors, ultra-wide displays. We've developed the solutions that will allow you to create different aspect ratios from 7 to 1, 5 to 1, 8 to 1, up to 45 inches using a signature controller. This is the kind of stuff that you're going to start seeing in a couple years where the OEMs actually are asking for filler to filler kind of a solution. We're enabling that kind of a solution using our MXT controller. So it's controlling the touch screen? It's controlling the touch screen here as well. So you're interacting touch over here. Here's an example. We have the side view mirror. You can zoom and pan, right? It kind of gives you the ability to bring everything inside the car, infuse your aerodynamics, infuse your fuel efficiencies. Same thing applies over here as well. So we have the ability to touch at all these different areas and you can go all the up to 45 inches with a single chip controller. All right. Single chip, capacitive touch controller, special functions around that. Especially for automotive you need to have reliability. For automotive you actually do need reliability and functional safety. So we're also integrating a lot of functional safety which is running diagnostics while the acquisition is being done without actually compromising the latency or the performance of the system itself. All right. And then I'll check out some of the other systems around here. All right. Maybe you can hang over the microphone. So I'm just coming over here. You can get mic, mic'd up right here. Yeah, we met last year. Yeah. So you can have it right there. Maybe you can step it on right there. Cool. Okay, let's just stick back on my belt or something. In the front sir. In the front's better for a blue. It's different side of the way. Oh, got it. Yeah. Okay. So what are you showing around here? Sure. So we're showing off some things that you can do with MaxTouch that you can't quite do on your cell phone or your tablet. This is a ruggedized tablet from a company called Juniper Systems and I can grab a normal wooden pencil. So this isn't your $100 Apple pencil. This is a two cent number two pencil from Staples or Office Depot. I'm going to make the situation even harder by grabbing a leather glove that's also not conductive. Wood, of course, doesn't conduct electricity or electrons either. The lead in the pencil is conductive. So I can take advantage of our very high SNR or signal to noise ratio and grab this and write on a capacitive touchscreen. It's amazing all the amount of technology we put into play just to get a two cent pencil to work on a touchscreen but this is amazing physics here. We're relying on a very small amount of charge displacing from the touch sensor. The small amount of electrons jump into the lead of the pencil. They don't have anywhere to go. There's just more electrons in the sensor than there is in the pencil so few of them will jump across. We can count them and track them accurately and reliably on a running Windows tablet here with a noisy charger. Our CES demos are all kind of powered together. Tremendously noisy. Also in a floating state it works great as well but in the noisy state the noise is often much bigger than the level of signal. So being able to pull off something like this is is an impressive feat. So it's in a capacitive touchscreen firmware and the algorithm. There's hardware and firmware. So we're leveraging some patents that we have that allow us to sense touch differentially which helps eliminate the common mode noise from coming into the controller. And then we have some sophisticated algorithms many of which are patented to avoid noise and then filter noise that is broad spectrum and can't be filtered. And you have some more touchscreen demos around here? Absolutely. So this is another couple of demos showing the use of a thick love on a touchscreen. So let's find the calculator. Here it is. And we can show that you can still use a calculator reliably and accurately through the presence of a thick love. Nice. Yeah. So it's hard to do. This is very hard to do. It effectively looks like a hovering finger. In fact, if I take the glove off my finger above the sensor you can see that we can tell the difference between a glove and a hovering touch. My hovering finger doesn't detect a touch but when my finger is in a glove then and only then does it report the touch. All right. Pretty sure around here. Sure. So this is a brand new chip. This is called the MXT 2952TD. So it's a different chip. New technology from us. It's using another patent of ours called differential mutual sensing. I showed you before working with one very thick finger. There's other controllers in the market that can do a single thick finger as well. What we're able to do though is work with now multi-touch thick gloves. We can rotate. We can zoom. We can pinch. And I've got two very thick gloves at play. This is something that's really quite revolutionary especially when you consider the fact that this is an 8mm cover glass equivalent. This monitor originally had 1.1mm glass. We took a 6mm piece of glass with an air gap and glued this whole thing together so that now it looks like 8mm of glass. Just sensing a bare finger through such a thick lens is a challenge. Adding a thick glove on top of that, that's really tough. Nice. And what's happening here? This is Garmin Marine. It's a marine GPS and fish finder. We can support lots of water on the system. So picture rain coming down. You're on a boat. It's very rainy. No false touches. But you still want to be able to use the GPS and you want to be able to use it with multi-touch. So you expect that your multiple touches should still work reliably and accurately. Now let's picture that there's a tsunami and big ocean waves are starting to come and crashed up on the boat. Now we've got 5% salt water. 5% is the saltiest water you find in oceans. Most ocean waters 3.5%. As water gets saltier and saltier, it becomes more and more conductive. It becomes frankly a nightmare for a capacitive touchscreen. If you spray this water on your cell phone or on your tablet, 5% saline, it'll go crazy. Human blood saline solution in the medical environment is only 0.9% saline. It's frankly pretty easy for us. 5% this is a big challenge. So spray this on. We noticed that there's no false touches at all. And now I can still, even with moving salt water around my finger, I can still use the touchscreen. So that means that our fisherman who's on the boat in the tsunami can navigate home safely to his family thanks to max-touch technology. Tsunami is a pretty challenging thing. I hope our fisherman is not out there on his own in a little boat. But if it comes along while he's fishing, he can now use Garmin. If it's out in the deep sea, it's okay. That's right. As far as I remember. All right. So here is our 3D gesture technology that we're showing. This is a light switch simulation. We can show the range here that the light switch is just woken up with this kind of a range. I can now turn on the lights with I can now use an air wheel gesture to turn the lights back on to dim the lights or turn them back up, making them a little bit brighter. Turn them on all the way. Is this capacitive technology? Also capacitive. Yes. Everything that we do now in microchip for touch sensing or air gesture sensing is all capacitive based. So we're relying on electric fields here. So this is a kind of a demonstration board showing a light switch. This same technology has been integrated into several shipping products. This is a little video wall showing a Jaguar moonroof that uses it to open and close the moonroof. A Sony speaker, a smart mirror from Burbank where you can turn on and off the lights and a Muriel photo frame in the lower right. We have that frame in the home section where you can change artwork all with a gesture of your hand. This is a speaker set from Cambridge Audio from the UK that has integrated the same gesture technology to control the speaker. So as my hand approaches, you'll see the speaker is just lit up. So now these capacitive touch buttons have been revealed. I can play music or pause music and then I can also switch to the next track all without having to touch the speaker. This is on the market. I'm sorry? It's for sale in the market. That's correct. Yes. I think $250 on Amazon. They also have batteries in them too. Left and right and they run for several hours off of batteries. Nice. And you have more and more stuff. Can you just put this on the other side? Yes. This is interference. Sure. Things. So what do you show here? So this one is kind of the integration of everything I've shown you. Our 2D and 3D technology merging together. So here we have a system. This could be full screen album art if you listen to music. It could be full screen GPS or maps if you're using it to navigate. When your hand comes in range, now the GUI changes and you can see your settings buttons. So we can now navigate through menus and choose which menu we want to go into all with using gestures. I can go down and we can switch through some slides. I'm controlling this all without even touching the system. Think about a medical environment where doctors, as soon as they touch a surface, they have to wash their hands again. Now you can scroll through x-ray images. You can zoom in, zoom out all without having to touch the system. Is this all this stuff is brand new is already except for those speakers and other bunch of things in the market. So yes, this chip has been shipping for a few years. We have a new generation of chip. This is now automotive grade. And there's a new version that's both automotive and industrial grade that's been released to mass production middle of last year. So that's just now getting designed into new products. New cars into new cars and other gestures for stuff. And that's right. This is a technology demonstration where we're merging the gesture chip and our Max Touch 2D touch screen technology together. So this is a multi-chip chip set that we're demonstrating as a technology to drive the new use cases. All right. And this is a form. Finally, you've seen our I think some of our knob on display technology in the automotive use case. This is showing home appliance environment. So we have an oven above us and then we have an oven below. Left knob controls the top oven. Right knob controls the bottom oven. We can set our cooking mode touch in the middle and then change the temperature of the oven. Click it again. And now we change our time that we want to cook at and then click it and we've now started cooking all without using a very ergonomic and these are fixed permanently or can stick on and stick off. They're stuck in place. We use a 3M automotive grade double stick tape. Our Max Touch controller needs to know the size, the shape and position of the knob. And it's basically a software-defined knob. It's a standard touch sensor. There's no special sensor pattern design required. You just need a special controller to handle the knob. All right. That's a lot of cool touch technologies right here. Very good. This also. Yeah. This is one of our partners called Gray Hill. So I just showed you knob on display. This is the opposite here. This is display on knob where Gray Hill is taking a Max Touch touchscreen and integrating it onto a mechanical knob. This knob feels wonderful. This is a really great sensation that Hall Effect sensors. So kind of traditional mechanical knob, but they're bringing into the modern era by adding a touchscreen so I can swipe between different modes. Here I can change my fading. If I swipe this way I can now I'm on FM. I can swipe again. I'm on AM. I can change my frequency here. I'm on satellite radio just as one of many different use case examples. And this is showing a trend in many different industries moving towards in mold electronics where electronics can physically be mounted and including touch sensors behind plastic that gets thermal formed into different shapes. So imagine an automotive environment where you can feel where the volume controls are or the temperature controls without having to look at them. And here you've got haptic feedback as well so I can feel the sensation. I know something's happening and you can get audio feedback from the system as well. Is it vibrating? It's vibrating. So give that a feel. Wow. Is vibrating the whole surface? It vibrates some localization. So you get a little sensation kind of near where your finger is pressing. That feels cool. Some of these are force enabled as well. So if you touch lightly nothing happens, but if you press a little harder it feels like you're pressing a button. All right. So this is another growing trend called in mold electronics. Nice.