Spotlight On
significant proportion of our annual revenues into our R&D and manufacturing capabilities, to enhance our capability and offer customers innovative, useful touch sensing products.
How has the company had to change to keep up with developments and changes in the market?
As customers’ product design cycles have become shorter and shorter, we’ve had to become more agile ourselves. We’ve always taken pride in our in-house glass processing capabilities, which we’ve continued to improve. In the last decade, we’ve also built our expertise in the touch control electronics too – and now design all of our own touch controllers, write our own touch detection firmware and have even invested millions of pounds into developing our own touch ASIC’s, so we have complete ownership of or touch sensing technologies. Our customers value this, as they have the peace of mind that the supply chain is under control and not subject to third party subcontractors or suppliers suddenly announcing ‘end of life’ on the electronics. It also enables us to quickly customise solutions for our client’s specific applications. We are always ahead of the trends in
our core sectors, and regularly are the first to deliver innovations seen on smart phones and tablets on large format touch screens. A great example is force sensing (also known as 3D touch) where the sensor responds to the degree of pressure exerted on the screen as well as to the location of the touch. Zytronic was the first to offer this capability on large touchscreens of 40” – 85” diagonal. To do this, we developed a completely unique approach as the technology used on phones won’t scale to screens of this size. We have also been pioneers in secure encrypted touch sensors in transactional kiosks, curved interactive surfaces for casino cabinets, object recognition and rugged, anti-microbial glass touch screens for high use unattended environments.
What experiences has helped you most as CEO of Zytronic?
Before becoming CEO of Zytronic over ten years ago, I had the benefit of performing most of the major management roles including technical director, business development director, quality director and marketing director – the only exception is Finance which really does require specialist skills. This has given me an invaluable insight into every area of our business. Zytronic’s success is based not only on having good people, but on having the right people with the capabilities of doing the right thing at the right time. As CEO, I have an overriding view and am responsible for bringing everyone together
to deliver the business goals. The experience of doing those jobs helps me to evaluate their thought patterns and act as mentor and guide.
Where do you see the future of electronic displays going and why?
Displays are still central to what we do – we haven’t reached the end of the line in terms of display development as a method of directly interfacing with equipment. The market overall is still growing as displays are added to appliances that never had them before. I expect great strides to be made in the performance of displays, the appearance and resolutions available, their durability and power consumption but
they will be a central part of our lives for the long term. As long as there are displays there will be a need and desire to touch them – though again the technology to detect and measure that touch will evolve. There are a number of interesting touch technologies in the lab, and we are monitoring them so that we are in a position to move forward when they become commercially viable and relevant to the markets in which we operate.
How do electronic displays impact people’s lives?
One day, we may all have chips implanted in our brains which will read our minds and eliminate the need for displays, but that day is some way off I think and even VR headsets are still in their infancy. Video and photos need to be seen and text is best read. People constantly require visual information and a display of some kind is still the best way of presenting it.
During the course of your career so far, what has been the most exciting development you have been involved in?
The introduction of Zytronic’s MPCT (Multitouch Projected Capacitive Technology) in 2012 has been the most significant development of my career both in terms of the size of the project and its impact on the business. We took this technology right from identifying the opportunity and creating thoughts and ideas to implementation. This involved identifying the right technical approaches, the right materials, the right manufacturing processes and the right control technologies. We have now patented this technology and it is the mainstay of our business. Our new touch controller, ZXY500, represents a significant step forward but is still built on the foundations we laid then.
www.zytronic.co.uk www.cieonline.co.uk Components in Electronics November 2018 35
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