Feature Story

DISPLAYS

Stantum hopes to raise $50 million this year as it moves to expand its OEM business and begin making a new microcontroller to bring its multi-touch sensing technology to CE products, CEO Guillaume Largillier said.

The French company, which last year raised $2.6 million from XAnge and other French venture capital firms, intends the micro-controller for two- to five-inch displays used in cell phones, digital audio and digital media players, he said. Stantum is near agreement with a semiconductor maker to produce the unit, to be available by December, Largillier said. The key to Stantum's technology is a controlling method combined with the ability to detect and track multiple touch contacts with a display.

Conventional touch controllers can't detect more than one contact at a time. Stantum, called JazzMutant until January, got its start with the Lemur multi-touch surface controller for digital audio workstations. The Lemur melds a 12-inch LCD with 800x600 resolution containing Stantum multi-touch technology with an embedded processor, graphics processing unit and floating point arithmetic unit.

As it pushed into CE, Stantum used May's Society for Information Display show to debut a development kit built around a 15.4W LCD with 1,280x800. The LCD, made by China's Arayon Optics, is part of a development kit that also includes Stantum's PMatrix multi-touch sensor and an electronic controller embedded with the company's scanning technology.

Stantum has one European patent and 13 others pending, said Largillier. Stantum, which maintains a unit called JazzMutant, might consider splitting off its OEM business from JazzMutant, Largillier said. "The business is so different that it might make sense, but at this stage it is not a big issue," he said. Stantum, with 20 employees, expects to grow to 25 to 30 this year, Largillier said. It will open offices in U.S. and Taiwan in 2009, he said.

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