This year it unveiled a pen-and-touch screen that enables drawing with a stylus and manipulating the image with fingers. The display is intelligent enough to ignore casually resting a hand on the screen.

Jennifer Colegrove, an analyst with DisplaySearch, says PPI has technology called Active Stylus that includes a pressure-sensitive battery-powered stylus. If a person presses harder on the screen with the active pen, it creates a wider line, similar to how a pencil makes a wider, darker line when pressed harder into paper. Freehand drawings can be more precise, she says. 

Owning the technology will give Microsoft the ability to either build devices on its own or license others to make them. Currently the iPad, which some see as a competitor to Microsoft's announced Surface touch tablets, doesn't have a similar stylus, Colegrove says. 

Combined with current Microsoft partner products, its software will be able to run on devices as small as phones and as large as PPI's biggest displays.

During a speech at a conference earlier this year, PPI's founder and CTO Jeff Han said the technology could readily support a 200-inch touchscreen if one that big were available. To date, PPI buys displays made by other vendors and enables them for multi-touch.