Product category:
Programmable Logic Devices
News Release from: QuickLogic | Subject: Dual display CSSP solution
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 03 January 2008
Programmable devices answer display
challenge
Simultaneous display solution enables developers to implement a wide range of exciting handheld capabilities.
Handheld product developers can now add simultaneous video output without sacrificing battery lifetime or burdening the host application processor The solution - developed by QuickLogic and Chrontel - has already been adopted by a leading smart phone manufacturer and may be customised easily to match a wide range of design needs required by other adopters
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 27 Mar 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
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"This is an example of QuickLogic's low power Customer Specific Standard Product (CSSP) solutions providing fast time to market and design flexibility for handheld applications", says Owen Bateman of QuickLogic.
"This new simultaneous display solution enables developers to implement a wide range of exciting handheld capabilities, such as plugging a PDA into a conference room television to give a presentation, playing a mobile-phone video game on a TV, or even watching a movie stored on a portable media player on any TV".
Working in conjunction with Chrontel, QuickLogic addressed three major challenges associated with the simultaneous display of images on both LCD screens and external video devices such as televisions and VGA projectors, which have different, scan directions.
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The first challenge was providing the memory control to manage frame buffers using an x-y pixel swap that provides correct simultaneous image display on both the portrait-mounted LCD panels common to handheld devices and the landscape-oriented displays of television and video projectors.
The second challenge was to accommodate frame- and pixel-rate differences between LCD and various television standards, including Pal and NTSC.
The third was to provide this functionality without making excessive demands on system battery power and without requiring host processor intervention beyond setup and configuration.
QuickLogic's CSSP solution leverages the company's ultra-low-power-consumption programmable fabric to implement the memory interfaces, RGB interfaces, x-y swap conversion logic and active power management needed to address these challenges, all in a single device.
When coupled with Chrontel's CH7013 TV encoder and a mobile SDRAM frame buffer, the total design handles all rate conversions and voltage level shifting needed to get input data from the LCD display controller on the application processor and drive the TV encoder device.
"By partnering with QuickLogic", adds David Tsai of Chrontel, "we have successfully developed an approach that enables portrait-oriented images and video from mobile handsets, PDAs and PMPs to display correctly on conventional Pal and NTSC displays".
"QuickLogic's CSSP handles all the timing related to the various display rates and scan direction conversion while the CH7013 processes and tunes the video stream to produce excellent TV-out quality".
As with all of its CSSP designs, QuickLogic can adapt its x-y swap system block to meet a customer's specific needs, speeding time to market for developers having unique requirements.
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