Atmel Aims to be King of Touchscreens (ATML, NVDA, AAPL, HPQ, DELL, RIMM)

Atmel Corporation (NASDAQ: ATML) is trading marginally higher today on news that it is collaborating with NVIDIA Corporation (NASDAQ: NVDA).  The collaboration is actually right in the sweet spot of the current technology market.  The two are bringing high-performance and multi-touch capabilities to the large-format touchscreen market.

What this translates to is bringing the NVIDIA Tegra 2 mobile super-chip together with Atmel’s maXTouch mXT1386 solution.  The aim is to power touchscreens of up to 15 inches for tablet PCs, smartphones, mobile Internet devices, and other touchscreen device applications.

This joint reference design includes Tegra 2 and Atmel’s maXTouch solution and runs on the Android operating system from Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG). NVIDIA’s Tegra 2 is aimed at the next wave of smartphones and tablets with the multimedia experience. Tegra 2 claims up to two times faster browsing, hardware accelerated Flash, and console-quality gaming with a GeForce™ GPU.

The Atmel maXTouch touchscreen chipset enables a touch user to have 16-simultaneous touches with faster response, better power consumption and rejection of unintended touches; applications range from gaming to making calls, drawing, gesturing and more.

With Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) having kicked off the move into the realm of tablet-PC devices, we have just seen the fresh offering from Hewlett Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) for its tablets and smartphones under Palm.  Dell has also added its Streak family of tablets and Venue family of smartphones, and Research-in-Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) is already well-heeled in smartphones and just recently showed its PlayBook tablet.  Others are already on the market and more are coming.  The question is whether or not these devices down the road will have versions that include the Tegra 2 and Atmel’s maXTouch solution.

NVIDIA is up 0.75% at $23.65 and Atmel is up 1.75% at $16.40.

JON C. OGG