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Display IC with embedded graphics
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Most mobile phones of the past decade had a simple text-based
user interface, with hardly any animations and only very basic games such
as Snake. The new generation of phones is rapidly gaining market share.
These phones attract users by providing features familiar from PCs: colour
displays, graphical user interfaces, animation and well-designed games.
Some of these new-generation phones are already on the market, like Nokia's
recently released N-Gage platform. Keenly aware of this trend, NEC Electronics
teamed up with Bitboys to develop graphics accelerator cores for mobile
devices. This cooperation produced a family of graphic cores that includes
devices that enable faster user interfaces, scalable fonts and vector graphics.
The cores support games starting from simple 3D games up to Playstation-1
level and full Open GL ES support. The first device, available right now,
is a single-chip controller driver for TFT-LCD displays. It has an embedded
graphics engine not only to accelerate user interfaces, scaleable vector
graphics (SVG) and basic 3D games but also to improve the image quality
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Short design-in-time
Integration in the TFT-LCD controller driver obviously
reduces the design-in time into mobile phones compared with integration
in baseband or application processors that usually takes 1.5 to 2 years.
All the phone manufacturer needs to do is to use a different TFT module
with the single-chip solution mounted on glass and to update the phone's
software to take advantage of the acceleration. It is worth remarking
that the legacy display mode is still supported - software can be upgraded
step-by-step and existing applications will continue to work. The performance
gain and the improvement in image quality over software - running on powerful
processors - is huge, even though the integration is very much a silicon-
sized optimized solution.
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Anti-aliased vector graphics
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integrated graphics engine accelerates the vector graphics, a drawing
mode that is very beneficial for mobile devices. It has hardware support
for cubic and quadratic Bezier curve tesselation. In short, the graphics
engine supports a wide range of applications that until now would have
required high-performance, power-hungry processors. An extremely valuable
add-on is that all graphics are displayed in anti-aliased quality, a feature
that is virtually impossible to provide by software today. Anti-aliasing
is of great advantage for mobile devices as screen resolution is usually
quite low, resulting in jagged polygon edges. Anti-aliasing addresses
this problem, making it possible to display more and smaller objects in
better quality. The feature can be used with absolutely no impact on overall
performance, thanks to an innovative algorithm implemented in hardware.
In addition to features specific to vector graphics, the LCD controller
driver hardware also supports alpha blending, another task that is typically
very processor intensive. A 16-step alpha blend function can be applied
to any object to create semi- transparent, on-screen overlays.
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New visual experience
A typical application that exploits these features is the user interface. New
is capability of the user inter- face to utilize scalable TrueType fonts and
Kanji characters. The graphics engine can rasterize the fonts to any character
size directly from a vector description to eliminate the need to store fonts
in memory-intensive bitmap formats. Vector graphics is also suitable for rendering
animations created using the SVG standard. The graphics engine supports the
SVG Tiny standard feature set. Like SMS and MMS picture messages, SVG animations
are small enough to be sent via the MMS messaging system. The content can range
from cartoons to scalable business graphics. The new chip is also perfectly
suit- able to visualize vector maps for very space-efficient, scalable and zoom-and-pan
operations. Finally the inte- gration supports simple 3D games by rendering
3D graphics primitives in hardware. The split between hard- ware and software
occurs after geo- metry processing. The graphics core accepts screen-space triangles
and polygons for rendering.
Reduced power consumption
System power consumption is sharply reduced, thanks to the hard- ware acceleration.
A comparison of applications, such as simple user interfaces and animations
run- ning either on ARM7TDMI or accelerated in hardware, show that a reduction
in power consumption up to 80% can be expected. This reduction was the result
of both the size-optimized integration and the low operating frequency. Evaluation
systems of the TFT-LCD controller IC with graphics engine and demo software
are available immediately.
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