Touch Panels with thick gloves |
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PenMount
PCI Supports Gloved Operation
Applications for projected capacitive touch panels are very extensive
and often include industrial control systems, medical equipment, and outdoor
devices. Based on safety, hygiene, and climate
considerations many of these applications require operators to wear gloves
while using the PCI touch panel. In order to satisfy customer needs, PenMount
PCI touch controllers have a comprehensive strategy regarding gloved
operation.
The PCI touch panel operating principle begins when the touch panel
detects a conductor (such as a finger or water). Then the PCI touch
controller processes the received signal through an algorithm to determine
the touch point. When users wear gloves, the touch signal strength will be
reduced because the materials used by standard gloves, cotton, linen, latex
or functional glove coatings, possess
dielectric constants far lower than that of a finger. Moreover, glove
thickness is related to signal volume. The thicker the glove, the further a
finger is from the touch surface. Thus, the signal volume the PCI touch
controller is able to detect is also reduced.
Through a combination of hardware and firmware and paired with
adjustment by the PenMount PCIMSet utility, PenMount PCI controllers can
enhance touch sensitivity when users wear gloves during operation. PenMount
reduces noise through a signal/noise ratio processing firmware mechanism and
unique algorithm to obtain the best signal values. PenMount PCI controllers
support the use of many types of gloves while, simultaneously, taking into
account the reliability and dependability of touch operation.
PenMount PCI touch controllers support most glove types such as common
rubber gloves, standard cold weather cotton or leather gloves, silicone or
latex gloves prevalent in medical environments, etc. Practically, when
medical personnel wear multiple layers of medical latex gloves to avoid risk
of infection, PenMount PCI controllers continue to operate normally and
smoothly. PenMount PCI controllers also support thick glove materials and
gloves with special surface treatments. In addition to a "touch
mechanism," the PCI gloved touch solution introduced by PenMount also
provides drawing and gesture functions and two-finger zoom in/out when using
most glove types. You can watch a video detailing gloved functions supported
by AMT and PenMount PCI touch solutions here: AMT Touch Screens with Gloves
You may wish to know whether this excellent gloved support requires
special conditions or firmware pairings? Whether gloved operation requires
abandoning other specifications? In addition to meeting the EMC testing
standards (IEC 61000-4-3 RS Level III 10V/m and IEC 61000-4-6 CS Level III
10Vrms) most important to industrial applications, standard PenMount PCI
controller firmware can also comprehensively implement a water handling
mechanism and gloved operation. PenMount PCI controllers, integrate these
three, seemingly impossible to simultaneously co-exist, features into one
standard firmware. Of course, we are happy to provide firmware customization
services to conform to different glove types.
PenMount's design philosophy is greater consideration on behalf of
customers and understanding actual customer needs to provide comprehensive
touch solutions that allow customers to introduce PCI applications. PenMount
provides customers with reliable and convenient touch products and a complete
series of utilities to fulfill common usage requirements and facilitate your
product development. If you have any questions or product inquires, you are welcome
to contact us for more information.
More details on all the AMT range of products can be seen at www.review-displays.co.uk
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As Intel’s Skylake processors start to find their way into more systems, they’ll bring faster clock speeds to a wider array of systems than ever before. But Skylake also brings with it a rich new set of features and improvements over Haswell. From 4K support to better power efficiency, upgrading to a Skylake processor could make a real difference in your everyday computing experience.
Up to 30 percent better battery life
Intel has worked harder than ever to create CPUs in a wide range of power envelopes, and it shows with the wide array of power efficient chips. When discussing new processors, the Thermal Design Power (TDP) is the amount of energy required to keep the chip cooled as it runs, and is used to compare the required power of chips outside of the context of a system.
Although big gaming processors like the 6700K have a TDP of 91 Watts, the chips in the Skylake family reach all the way down to 4.5 Watts for Core M chips. Haswell chips ranged from 11.5 Watts to 145 at the enthusiast level, so this is a distinct improvement in terms of cooling power needed.
That doesn’t just have an effect on the number of systems Skylake chips can find their way into, either. Better power efficiency across the board means high-end systems consume less, lowering power costs and power supply needs. It also means mobile systems have much better battery life, although Intel’s claims of up to 30 percent longer battery life may be a little generous.
Dedicated processor for photos
Skylake also means business when it comes to support cameras, and as such, the U and Y-series Skylake chips will include a dedicated Image Signal Processor. Normally this sort of task would be handled by a dedicated GPU, but systems with those low power envelope chips usually have integrated graphics. Skylake chips that do sport an ISP support up to four 13 megapixel cameras, and can capture streams from two cameras at once.
Notably, that means these chips will also support Intel RealSense, a dual-sensor camera that is able to create detailed 3D models and recognize faces to enable Windows Hello’s facial login feature, and they’ll do so without the help of a discrete GPU.
Sharper RAM
Skylake isn’t so focused on itself that it can’t think of other components, and it shows with the improvements to memory efficiency that are a core part of its architecture.
DDR4 is simply the next step up from DDR3 in terms of RAM technology. Although it hasn’t been fully realize yet, there’s a lot of potential performance and power efficiency improvements on the horizon. Ultimately, this will lead to more concrete improvements in computing, but for now, the important thing to note is that Skylake systems are, at least for the moment, only capable of using DDR4 RAM, so if you upgrade your CPU, you’ll have to upgrade your memory (and motherboard) as well.
Intel
eDRAM is a different story. Appearing on non-socket chips that sport Iris and Iris Pro integrated graphics, the eDRAM is either 64 or 128MB respectively of memory integrated directly onto the chip. It ends up costing a little more, but is one of the reasons Iris and Iris Pro graphics are able to support multiple 4K displays. It’s essentially video RAM for your integrated graphics chip, and makes a huge difference in performance on systems that lack a dedicated graphics option.
You can turn it up to 11
If you’re sitting a little further toward the enthusiast end of the computing spectrum, you’ll be pleased to know that unlocked chips are back and more overclockable than ever. The unlocked Skylake chips are set to more highly customizable clock ratings, allowing you to scale by as little as 1MHz at a time. There is also, for the first time ever, unlocked Skylake chips making their way to laptops (though Intel has yet to release the specifics). Cooling is a bit of an issue, so whether these chips will be unlocked to the user or just to the manufacturer is unclear as of yet.
Our own experience overclocking the high-end i7-6700K went well, and we were able to push a 4GHz base clock up to 4.9GHz with air cooling, although 4.8 was much more stable. With a 20 percent boost to speed, the chip experienced a major improvement of 20 percent in the Geekbench CPU test. The chip has a theoretical limit that’s much higher, but only with carefully tuned cooling could you raise it much higher in practice.
Chips to look for
At Intel’s IFA press conference, a few dozen Skylake chips were unveiled across a wide array of power levels. Among those are a few chips that you’re likely to see more of than others.
The most common is likely to be the Core i5-6200U, the sequel to the popular i5-5200U. It’s a dual-core chip with Hyperthreading, and it has a base clock of 2.3GHz and a Boost clock of 2.8GHz. The 6200U also packs in Intel HD 520 graphics, and does it all in a 15W TDP.
Desktop buyers should check out the Core i5-6400U. It is the most basic mainstream quad-core and sells at a good price. If you’re on a very tight budget, the Core i3-6300 could be the way to go. It has dual-cores, but also has Hyper-Threading, so it supports four processing threads (think of it as a virtual quad-core). It’s also the cheapest processor to offer 4MB of Level 2 cache, which is important in certain intensive applications, including games.
Also of note are the 28 Watt U-series CPUs. These low-power chips don’t skimp on graphical performance, and include Intel Iris 550 integrated graphics. They’re all dual-core chips, and will likely end up in smaller performance-minded laptops like the 13-inch Macbook Pro.
Should you upgrade?
There’s no real right answer to that question, but there are some questions you should ask yourself before buying or building a new PC. CPUs remain relevant for several generations, especially because the performance jump between years is minimal – Skylake doesn’t differ from any other Intel release in that aspect.
That being said, if it’s time for an upgrade, it’s worth buying the Skylake option. From what we’ve seen so far, the Sixth Generation Intel chips are more power efficient, and bring a feature set to the platform that is causing manufacturers to update entire computing lines with the new chips. On top of that, the next major step forward in Intel CPUs won’t be hitting shelves until at least 2017, so these Skylake chips are going to be in computers for the foreseeable future.
