ARM Community: Selecting a Microcontroller with LCD Interface for Improved User Interface - ARM Community

With the rise of advanced graphics on smartphones and tablets, users are demanding higher quality and faster response times from all user interface displays including industrial products. The simple segment displays for human interface are quickly becoming the minority in all but the lowest cost applications.

Adding an LCD controller to your next design
When choosing a high-performance LCD Graphics controller, designers should consider bandwidth use cases for example how often will the information be refreshed, the use of colors (number of color and depth,) software support that allows a variety of panels to be used and choices of multiple effects to be implemented quickly and easily in the design.

To meet this growing demand for quality displays, NXP has included a high-performance LCD Graphics controller on a number of new ARM Cortex-M3 and Cortex-M4 processor-based microcontrollers. The Cortex-M3 LPC178x series is the first of these new series to be shipping in volume.

Webinar about the NXP Cortex-M based microcontroller with LCD
To assist our customers in learning more about the LPC178x series, NXP recently conducted an LCD webinar, in partnership with the EETimes.

The webinar introduces the LPC1788 product, discusses the LCD controller and the LCD types it can efficiently drive, discusses bandwidth considerations, demonstrates its operation using the supporting libraries from NXP and third parties and finally, summarizes the tools support for the part including boards, LPCXpresso IDE and sample library code and application notes.

The webinar was well attended and generated a nice exchange of questions and answers with the worldwide audience. I’ve included some of the most popular questions for you here, but the complete list of FAQ’s can be found here.

FAQs from webinar on memory size, bandwidth calculation, LCD DMA

Q: Do you have size limit or memory size calculator to help set the size of the frame buffer?

A: The size limit for the LCD frame buffer is 1024x1024x4, which would be a 1K x 1K x 24bpp display. You can compute a frame buffers memory requirements by multiplying the X resolution by the Y resolution by the color depth in bytes. For example, a 320x240 display at 16bpp (2bytes per pixel) would need 320x240x2 = about 150KBytes. You can also use the bandwidth calculator to compute this value. The bandwidth calculator can be found here.

Q: What exactly is SWIM?

A: SWIM is a "Simple Windows Interface Manager". It basically provides non-overlapping window regions with simple graphics primitives and text operations. It's easy to use, a great learning tool, and it's free. Find it here.

Q: Where can I find a list of NXP MCUs that have the LCD controller?

A: You can find a complete list of LCD controller-equipped microcontrollers, including Cortex-M3, -M4, ARM7 and ARM9 family processor-based MCUs, at our LCD landing page. You can also find all of the information on the LPC178x series here.

Q: Is the LCD DMA located in the LCD macrocell or the GP DMA ?

A: The LCD controller is its own bus master and isn't part of the General Purpose DMA module. DMA operation for the LCD controller is pretty much transparent - all you need to do is set up the LCD controller and point the frame buffer to an address.

Keep watching NXP (www.nxp.com/microcontrollers) for more information on the LPC1800 (Cortex-M3) and LPC4300 (Cortex-M4) series!

Guest Partner Blogger:

Gene Carter, International Product Marketing, NXP, He has over 17 years experience in the semiconductors industry. He holds a BSEE from Tufts University and an MBA from USC’s Marshall School of Business.

ARM welcomes its wealth of Partners in the ARM Connected Community (CC) to submit guest blogs to be published on our multiple community blogs. If interested in participating please submit email inquiries to Tell.Us@arm.com.

The ARM Connected Community (CC) is an extensive ecosystem covering all aspects of ARM-based design, from chip implementation through to system and device design. The CC provides a platform for collaborative innovation, with multiple types of forums for members to work with one another, and with customers, to solve industry challenges, all with the purpose of enabling designers to focus on differentiating features and an accelerated time-to-market for ARM powered solutions.