SANTA CLARA, USA: Synaptics Inc introduced two new touchscreens as it seeks to capitalize on the growing use of the technology, spurred by the popularity of smartphones such as Apple Inc's iPhone.

Chief operating officer Tom Tiernan told in an interview that he expects 20 percent of the more than 1 billion cellphones sold worldwide each year to have touchscreens in three to five years, up from less than one percent now.

The company -- whose technology is used by BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd and HTC Corp, the maker of the G1 using Google Inc's Android software -- unveiled a touchscreen on Wednesday that can recognize up to 10 simultaneous finger touches and multi-finger gestures.

It also introduced a second, cheaper touchscreen with fewer capabilities.

Smartphones remain one of the tech sector's fastest-growing and most resilient markets, with cellphone makers from Samsung Electronics Co Ltd to LG Electronics Inc vying to crank out new models at a rapid pace.

But touchscreens gained popularity relatively recently, with the iPhone playing a key role in popularizing an interface that the likes of Research in Motion and Palm Inc now also employ widely.

"Over the past number of quarters, we've gone from a relatively low percent of our total business coming from touchscreens on handsets to, depending on the quarter, 40 or 50 percent," Tiernan said.

"We've been able to continue to grow at strong double digits because of the adoption of our latest technology, which is touchscreens in handsets." 

Growth Drivers
Synaptics is not in the iPhone or Apple notebooks, but is in some iPods, Oppenheimer & Co analyst Yair Reiner said.

"When it (Apple) got into the market, a very large percentage of the phone makers who wanted to come up with a similar solution came to Synaptics for that product," he said.

Competitors could not use Apple's suppliers because much of Apple's technology is developed in-house.