Cirque Corporation is an American company which developed and commercialized the first successful capacitive
touchpad
A touchpad or trackpad is a pointing device featuring a tactile sensor, a specialized surface that can translate the motion and position of a user's fingers to a relative position on the operating system that is made output to the screen. Touchp ...
, now widely used in
notebook computers
A laptop, laptop computer, or notebook computer is a small, portable personal computer (PC) with a screen and alphanumeric keyboard. Laptops typically have a clam shell form factor with the screen mounted on the inside of the upper li ...
. Cirque develops and sells a variety of touch input products, both in
original equipment manufacturer
An original equipment manufacturer (OEM) is generally perceived as a company that produces non-aftermarket parts and equipment that may be marketed by another manufacturer. It is a common industry term recognized and used by many professional or ...
and end-user retail form. Cirque was founded in 1991 by George E. Gerpheide, PhD, and James L. O'Callaghan, to commercialize the GlidePoint technology invented in the 1980s by Gerpheide.
History
For many years, Gerpheide and O'Callaghan traveled in an attempt to convince makers of notebook computer to agree to use GlidePoint. Gerpheide recalls "We would often drive to the
COMDEX
COMDEX (an abbreviation of COMputer Dealers' EXhibition) was a computer expo trade show held in the Las Vegas Valley of Nevada, United States, each November from 1979 to 2003. It was one of the largest computer trade shows in the world, usually ...
trade show in
Las Vegas
Las Vegas (; Spanish for "The Meadows"), often known simply as Vegas, is the 25th-most populous city in the United States, the most populous city in the state of Nevada, and the county seat of Clark County. The city anchors the Las Vegas ...
and stay in a seedy hotel. There wasn't money for a booth at the show, so we carried our GlidePoint prototypes around the convention center making demonstrations to whoever was willing to watch. The early prototypes had a suitcase full of electronic circuits. I knew they could be shrunk into an
integrated circuit
An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...
, but we didn't have money for that either. So we were seeking a large leap of faith for a manufacturer to agree to use the technology. It was even worse because at that time most notebook computers were running
DOS
DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems.
DOS may also refer to:
Computing
* Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel
* Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...
, which did not need a pointing device!"
In April 1994, Cirque adapted GlidePoint into an integrated circuit and began selling a retail GlidePoint touchpad. The first notebook computer containing GlidePoint appeared soon thereafter. GlidePoint technology was licensed to
Alps Electric Co., Ltd., and Alps launched touchpad products into the market.
In 2003, Cirque was acquired by Alps Electric as a wholly owned subsidiary. Cirque continues to function as an independent research and technology development facility.
Technology
GlidePoint
GlidePoint was the first touchpad technology to be adopted in
notebook computer
A laptop, laptop computer, or notebook computer is a small, portable personal computer (PC) with a screen and alphanumeric keyboard. Laptops typically have a clam shell form factor with the screen mounted on the inside of the upper lid ...
s as a system
pointing device
A pointing device is a human interface device that allows a user to input spatial (i.e., continuous and multi-dimensional) data to a computer. CAD systems and graphical user interfaces (GUI) allow the user to control and provide data to ...
, that is, performing the same function as a
mouse
A mouse ( : mice) is a small rodent. Characteristically, mice are known to have a pointed snout, small rounded ears, a body-length scaly tail, and a high breeding rate. The best known mouse species is the common house mouse (''Mus musculus' ...
. Before that, system pointing was performed mostly using a small
trackball
A trackball is a pointing device consisting of a ball held by a socket containing sensors to detect a rotation of the ball about two axes—like an upside-down ball mouse with an exposed protruding ball. Users roll the ball to position the on-s ...
embedded in the notebook computer case, and other mechanical devices. After GlidePoint's commercial introduction in April 1994, its popularity in notebook computers steadily increased and
Synaptics
Synaptics is a publicly owned San Jose, California-based developer of human interface (HMI) hardware and software, including touchpads for computer laptops; touch, display driver, and fingerprint biometrics technology for smartphones; and touch ...
and
Logitech
Logitech International S.A. ( ; often shortened to Logi) is a Swiss multinational manufacturer of computer peripherals and software, with headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Newark, California. The company has offices throughout Europe, ...
also introduced
capacitive touchpad
In electrical engineering, capacitive sensing (sometimes capacitance sensing) is a technology, based on capacitive coupling, that can detect and measure anything that is conductive or has a dielectric constant different from air. Many types of sens ...
technologies. , both Synaptics and GlidePoint touchpads are used widely, with approximately 90% of notebook computers using touchpads.
GlidePoint was not the first touch input technology. For example, it was pre-dated by resistive membrane input pads such as used in the Model 3155 Keyboard from
Keytronic
Keytronic (; formerly Key Tronic) is a technology company founded in 1969. Its core products initially included keyboards, mice and other input devices. KeyTronic currently specializes in PCBA and full product assembly. The company is among th ...
. Transparent resistive membrane technology is used in personal digital assistants such as the
PalmPilot
The PalmPilot Personal and PalmPilot Professional are the second generation of Palm PDA devices produced by Palm Inc (then a subsidiary of U.S. Robotics, later 3Com). These devices were launched on March 10, 1997.
Accessories and pricing
Pal ...
,
point of sale terminals,
video poker machine
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) systems ...
s, and information
kiosk
Historically, a kiosk () was a small garden pavilion open on some or all sides common in Iran, Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and in the Ottoman Empire from the 13th century onward. Today, several examples of this type of kiosk still exist ...
s and other touch screens. There are also prior capacitive touch input pads in the patent literature. One, "The UnMouse" was invented by James Logan and marketed by his company Microtouch Systems, Inc. as a retail plug-in mouse alternative product in the 1980s, but discontinued after a few years.
GlidePoint technology senses the presence and absolute position of a finger on the pad's surface using capacitive techniques. Because of the capacitive technique, it does not require electrical contact with the finger, nor does it require the finger to exert pressure on the pad. It measures very small capacitance changes, due to a finger's proximity, among electrodes in a grid buried beneath the insulating surface of the pad. From these measurements, it can determine if a finger is touching the pad, and if so, the finger's absolute position horizontally and vertically on the surface. Subtraction of a preceding absolute position from the present absolute position yields the relative motion of the finger during that time. This relative motion is the same as a mouse for controlling the position of a computer screen cursor.
GlideSensor
Cirque GlideSensor solutions are an extension of GlidePoint capacitive touch technology. They are configured to allow the rapid design of non-conventional touch input products. GlideSensor touch arrays may now be designed to take the form of thin films, flexible surfaces and irregular shapes.
GlideSensor’s mixed-mode ASIC controller was designed to blend the performance of GlidePoint with a low-voltage, low-power
EEPROM
EEPROM (also called E2PROM) stands for electrically erasable programmable read-only memory and is a type of non-volatile memory used in computers, usually integrated in microcontrollers such as smart cards and remote keyless systems, or as a ...
programmable processor. The result is a touch controller capable of being rapidly configured to solve the most unusual input application.
Key GlideSensor technology features at a glance include:
*Design sensors in circular, linear, flexible shapes
*Programmable controller for custom solutions
*Interfaced by SPI, I2C or PS2 for easy integration to microprocessor and PC-based systems
*Efficient low-power management
*Can sense through plastic materials of many colors
*Ideal for handheld portable battery-operated products
Products
Cirque's Circle Trackpad Development Kit is
Arduino
Arduino () is an open-source hardware and software company, project, and user community that designs and manufactures single-board microcontrollers and microcontroller kits for building digital devices. Its hardware products are licensed unde ...
based and uses open sourced code on GitHub. VR Grip™ is a technology platform that was featured at
CES 2018
CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event typ ...
.
Awards
*"Best Products of 1994."
''PC Magazine''. 10 January 1995, GlidePoint Touchpad, recognized as one of six best products on the cover.
*The company was twice recognized as one of the 500 fastest growing private company in America, "The 1997 Ranking of the Fastest-Growing Private Companies in America." Inc. Magazine v. 15 no. 19 p. 149.
References
{{Reflist
*A lay description of GlidePoint touchpad technology exists: "Working Knowledge, Touchpad Pointing Device." Scientific American. July 1998 p. 118.
*U.S. Patent No. 5,305,017. Gerpheide, parent application filing 16 August 1989.
External links
Cirque Corporation
Computer peripheral companies
Electronics companies of the United States