Salt Lake City, UT

Engineers from Cirque’s IC design and R&D teams will be speaking at the University of Utah this November. The subject will be driving innovation with multi-disciplinary engineering teams. No preregistration is required. For questions, contact Brent Quist at bquist@cirque.com.

Event Details:

Date and Time: Monday, November 27 at 3:00pm
Location: Warnock Engineering Building - 72 Central Campus Dr, Salt Lake City, UT

Discussion Abstract:

Cirque IC design and research engineers present a view of innovation and development principles in a small, technically diverse company competing in a marketplace dominated by large corporations.

Cirque Corporation invented capacitive touch pads in the early 1990’s. Since then, there have been many incremental developments mixed with some significant changes. Touch pads today have many more features including the ability to track multiple fingers and gestures. These require a complex system that involves a variety of engineering disciplines.

The peculiar market position of Cirque creates a unique development environment in which innovation is more important than professional position or engineering discipline. It is a vertical technical development environment, somewhat akin to a microcosm of Apple or Samsung.

IC Designers at Cirque Corporation utilize flexibility to innovate with input from strategic marketing, firmware, software, and Cirque’s parent company, Alps Electric Co., Ltd. Innovation is common and encouraged throughout the whole development process from every engineering discipline: silicon-firmware-PCB-module-software-test-production.

In a market dominated by ever-more-global large corporations, it is uncommon to find a small company that develops IC’s, PCB’s, in-house firmware / software, and modules. Cirque is one of those companies.