Display controllers dash to multimedia: News from Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe

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The new Coral family of graphics display controllers from Fujitsu Microelectronics offers major enhancements to the company's successful Cremson family. The new devices, the MB86294 and MB86295 (or Coral B and Coral P), are fabricated in 0.18-micron technology and are also optimised for vehicle navigation and in-car multimedia applications. Coral P includes several characteristics that make it ideal for European use.

The new family offers an increased internal operating frequency of 166MHz, enabling the rendering engine of the devices to achieve a tenfold improvement in texture mapping and drawing image quality compared to previous devices.

In addition, a 64bit memory bus, support for six independent layers, advanced alpha-blending features and enhanced video input facilities are available.

The enhanced bandwidth allows a much greater rate of access for graphics elements and delivers improved scanning functions at higher display resolutions.

Coral B is compatible with host CPU buses including Fujitsu FR, Hitachi SH3, SH4 and NEC V83 without external glue logic.

Coral P has a PCI host interface which conforms to the standard PCI V2.1.

All devices are binary compatible with previous generation graphic display controllers allowing faster developments and cost savings as existing software modules and drivers can be used without any modifications.

An enhancement to 2D drawing functions is the integration of a line depth display facility, which clearly defines the correct respective level of intersecting map lines.

In previous devices, additional software was required to achieve this level of refinement.

Enhanced hardware design also provides improvements in pattern line performance.

By assigning each layer with the picture size required, the six display layer concept is able to display simultaneous multiple high-resolution pictures in different sizes in any part of the screen, not just as whole screen.

All layers can have a colour depth of 8,16 or 24bit/pixel and can be changed in position, size and priority.

The maximum logical layer size has been increased to 4096 x 4096pixel.

Coral P has a number of enhanced features.

These include the device's external video input facility, This will conform to ITU656 (YUV), RGB666 and RGB888 standards and allow video signals to be displayed together with generated graphics.

The video input is able to accept TV tuner, DVD player or camera signals in pal or NTSC formats and allows rendered graphics from any other GDC to be used as the video input source.

The video stream is read, modified and written to a video buffer memory completely independently from the display scanning process.

Video pictures of diverse resolution and frame frequency rate, in either progressive or interlaced modes, can be grabbed, scaled and displayed picture-in-picture.

The latest automotive and consumer appliance screens are increasing in resolution to achieve better readability and demand improved pictures to match for example DVD quality.

In order to meet these demands, Coral integrates a new video input up-scaling facility, which now makes possible the display of a full-screen mode of multimedia pictures at high resolutions.

Both up-scaling and down-scaling can be set independently in horizontal and vertical directions in pixel or line resolutions.

Other enhancements include a serial interface (SIO), general-purpose input/output pins (GPIO), EEPROM connection and BGA packaging.

Fujitsu has also initiated the porting of drivers for all major operating systems like QNX, WinCE and Linux, which will be used in next generation automotive systems.

Coral GDCs are capable of operating over the temperature range -40 to +85C.

Engineering samples and evaluation boards of all versions are currently available.

In the future, Fujitsu will further extend the Coral family based on existing core technology.

In particular the designs will cover new automotive system concepts such as navigation systems, head units and comprehensive rear seat applications.

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