The recently announced CP2501 is a touch screen USB bridge that connects the touch screen controller with the host through a USB interface.  The bridge works with various touch screen sensing technologies including resistive and capacitive touch and PC system USB interface such as I2C, UART or SPI.

Touch screen devices with a USB interface are the primary targets for the CP2501. Depending on how many finger positions need to be supported or what kind of gestures need to be reported, you will appreciate the CP2501 because the sophisticated algorithms from capacitive touch screen (such as filtering, position reporting and gestures)  usually consume a lot of computing power or are completely unsupported by touch screen controllers. As a result, all these tasks will be loaded to the host, exacerbating the power consumption and generating latency between finger touch and system response. The CP2501’s powerful CPU and generous memory can offload all these from the host, thus saving power and improving user experience.

The CP2501 is unique in the industry with its pre-programmed firmware that greatly simplifies software development for touch screen USB communications. The interface is Windows 7 touch interface compliant and supports USB HID digitizer class. It is also supported by the Silicon Labs configuration wizard, a GUI-based development tool. The configuration wizard enables you to easily and quickly connect their touch controller to a USB system without having to develop customized USB firmware. This reduces your time to market and the level of software expertise required for USB interface development.

The primary applications for the CP2501 are laptop, all-in-one PC, tablet OEMs, ODMs and touch screen modules. Secondary applications include kiosks, ATMs, eBooks and MIDs. What these applications have in common are a touch screen using USB interface, high-performance requirements (such as power consumption, response time, etc.) and a concentrated and specialized supply chain.