Lawsuits Don't Deter SiS From Gaining Multitouch Windows 7 Certification

While staving off a patent infringement lawsuit, Silicon Integrated Systems is announcing a ten finger multitouch silicon solution with multi-gesture recognition support that has been certified for Microsoft Windows 7.

The company is involved in the research, development, production and distribution of integrated circuits (ICs). Their products include personal computer chipsets, mobile multimedia controller chips, digital television controller chips, as well as system-on-chip (SoC) integration and design.

You'll find SiS products in PCs, notebook computers, touch panels, game consoles, LCD high definition (HD) televisions and mobile devices.

Along with VIA Technologies, a fabless supplier of x86 processor platforms, SiS recently ran afoul of OPTi, a California-based semiconductor company. OPTi claimed in an August 2010 lawsuit that SiS had infringed on its patent for predictive snooping of cache memory for master-initiated accesses.

They also took AMD to court for infringement of the same patent. It wasn't so long ago that OPTi dismissed another patent case related to Compact ISA-Bus interface against VIA with prejudice.

The company dismissed a similar lawsuit against SMSC without prejudice when SMSC agreed to pay OPTi $1.9 million (image on the left represents an OPTi chip).

Regardless, SiS trudges on with their SIS9200 series projected capacitive multi-touch controller which is a highly integrated single chip design which supports from two-inch to 17-inch panel sizes. It provides system developers with a more lightweight board design.

SiS9200 series touch controller integrates 32-bit microcontroller, 12-bit analog-to-digital converter and clock controller. It comes with several built-in input and output interfaces, including USB, SPI, I2C, UART and GPIO. SiS9200 series touch controller can support up to a hundred sensing channels.

SiS9200 series touch controller supports both ITO glass and ITO film design. Users can place their hands or other objects on the touchscreen without it interfering with the gesture detection ability.

Another welcome feature is its water and moisture resistance, so sweat or droplets of splashed liquids aren't a big concern.

Headquartered in Taiwan, SiS reported third-quarter 2010 revenues of 808,444 million. The company is listed on Taiwan Stock Exchange under the code 2363, with the last trade for 21.05 $NT. SiS employs the services of  accounting firm Ernst and Young and is currently involved repurchasing 30 million shares between December 16, 2010 to February 15, 2011.