Microsemi announces SmartFusion cSoC reference design for industrial and medical LCD displays

ALISO VIEJO, USA: Microsemi Corp. announced the availability of an LCD display reference design for industrial and medical applications based on the company's SmartFusion customizable system-on-chip (cSoC).

The flexible cSoC architecture allows product developers to support a wide variety of LCD panel configurability options, as well as the ability to change LCD driver functionality to support product upgrades on a cost-effective, remote basis. In addition, the new platform supports Open Graphic Library Safety Critical (OpenGL SC), an industry-standard pertaining to the development of safety-critical embedded display systems.

Microsemi's award-winning SmartFusion cSoC integrates FPGA technology with a hardened ARM Cortex-M3 processor and programmable analog blocks. The OpenGL SC application programming interface (API) runs on SmartFusion's integrated ARM processor, enabling developers to easily create graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for standard or customized LCD displays.

The LCD display reference design is architecturally partitioned, with the computationally intensive portion of a customized display controller implemented within the SmartFusion flash-based FPGA fabric. This structure allows product engineers to harness the processing power of the ARM Cortex-M3 for key system layer control task management and algorithm execution tasks. This includes supporting human machine interface (HMI) functionality and various communication protocols that are typically required in industrial and medical applications.

The LCD display reference design also features:
* Fully customizable LCD controller with the ability to drive different display panels regardless of interface, resolution or manufacturer;
* LCD controller supporting timing generation, color space conversion and alpha blending;
* LCD backlight control; and
* Hardware acceleration using FPGA fabric, providing tight integration of processor system and programmable logic.

Microsemi's LCD display portfolio also includes a new non-dissipative LED backlight driver for LCD TV applications. The recently introduced LX27901 is the first device of its type to provide LED driving capabilities in televisions based on the LCD Integrated Power Supply (LIPS) architecture.