Sensel Supplies Haptic Touchpads for Lenovo’s ThinkPad Z13 and Z16

Sensel, the company building the next generation of touch-sensing, force-sensing, and haptics technologies, announced that it collaborated with Lenovo, the Fortune Global 500 technology powerhouse, to co-design the haptic touchpads for the second-generation ThinkPad Z13 and Z16.

Delivering these world-class haptic touchpads required extraordinary research and development to meet several engineering milestones:

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1. High-Fidelity Haptics: Sensel delivered a high-end programmable haptics solution, which allowed Lenovo to elegantly integrate three virtual haptic buttons into the upper portion of the touchpads. This enabled Lenovo to include the ThinkPad’s iconic red TrackPoint, and a large 120 mm touchpad, without sacrificing any touchpad real-estate to the TrackPoint buttons, resulting in an exceptional user experience for all.
2. Palm Rejection: The palm rejection in the Z13 and Z16 is world-class, as it must be robust enough to support two very different use-cases: typing, where the palms rest on the touchpad; and TrackPoint mousing, where the thumb and palm-edge rest on the touchpad. To accomplish this, Sensel developed a proprietary machine learning algorithm for palm rejection, which can uniquely distinguish fingers, thumbs, and palms, on hands of all shapes and sizes. The Touchpad also learns from each individual’s behavior, and automatically adapts to better interpret their intent, dynamically adjusting the palm rejection, tracking zone, tap rejection, and haptic click areas.
3. Accuracy: The Z13 and Z16 touchpads well exceed the Windows Precision Touchpad requirements for linearity, which means they’re incredibly accurate, allowing you to easily click that tiny X in those annoying pop-ups.

All this and more was fit into a module that’s substantially thinner than the vast majority of touchpads, including the most commonly used haptic trackpad.

“The second-generation ThinkPad Z13 and Z16 are the latest Lenovo laptops featuring a Sensel touchpad, but not the first, showing a committed, durable partnership between the two companies,” said Luis Hernandez, Vice President of Commercial Product Solutions Development, Intelligent Devices Group, Lenovo. “Coming off the success of the haptic touchpad in the ThinkPad X1 Titanium Yoga, which we also worked with Sensel on, we are inspired to continue innovating and collectively raising the bar on our touchpad experience.”

“In a major milestone for Sensel, these are the first true all-Sensel technology touchpads we’ve shipped, with Sensel providing the touch-sensing, force-sensing, and haptics for the Z13 and Z16”, said Sensel CEO and Co-founder, Ilya Rosenberg. “We’re honored to have worked with Lenovo on these remarkable laptops, which beautifully showcase the potential of Sensel’s technologies. Not only has Lenovo been a wonderful partner on these programs, but they’re also an invaluable strategic investor. Both companies pushed hard to create a fantastic touchpad user experience, and we couldn’t be prouder of the results.”

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The X1 Fold touchpad is also the first application of a brand new Sensel technology platform we call FusionUX, which combines our patented high-precision capacitive touch-sensing, high-accuracy capacitive force-sensing, and high-fidelity embedded haptics technologies, all on a single PCB. This provides our customers with the most streamlined haptic touchpad solution on the market. “We’re delighted to announce our new FusionUX tech stack, which eliminates the need for dedicated force sensors, a force sensing chip, high voltage electronics and haptics transducers,” said Sensel COO, Harsha Rao. “This latest evolution of our technology enables our customers to develop highly cost-effective and manufacturable smart-surfaces. This will pave the way for broader adoption of smart-surfaces in a wide array of products, making the technologies we use every day more intuitive and expressive — a future we’re excited to help usher in.”

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