Synaptics going driverless

DailyTech - CES 2014: Synaptics Shows Off New Touch Tech:

"One of the biggest recent innovations has been the switch to driverless devices and advance being co-championed by Microsoft Corp. (MSFT).  With its latest laptop touchpads a tiny onboard ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) handles all the responsibilities directly that drivers would have done.  The tiny chip even interfaces with connected networks via the motherboard bus to updates its internal firmware."

This is a bad news for researchers and developers like myself. That means that the gesture recognition algorithms will be even further removed from software and only ones implemented in firmware by the vendor will be able to access touch sensor raw data.