Fujitsus "Rose" GDC offers even more functionality for in-car navigation

Fujitsu Microelectronics Europe has now introduced the second device in its family of Graphic Display Controllers. Following closely behind the MB86290A Cremson" GDC, MB86291 Rose" offers even more functionality and has been developed for navigation and Multimedia Information terminals in vehicles.

With navigation systems and dashboards in the future showing even more visual displays than today, the GDCs on offer from Fujitsu are geared towards more multimedia-type applications in vehicles. The MB86291 Rose" device is fully compatible with the MB86292 Scarlet", the only difference between them being the internal logic. The former offers 32Mbit embedded SDRAM, and the latter 16Mbit embedded SDRAM, with both providing the new features of an enhanced rendering engine, a Geometry-Engine, Digital video capture and a Digital RGB video output.

With a higher bandwidth of 100MHz, access is much more efficient as no external SDRAM devices are required, also reducing EMI. A lower pin count of 208 pins is also a bi-product of the integrated SDRAM.

Additional Features
With an additional external video interface the RTB656, it is now possible to add digital video to Rose/Scarlet. Even video pictures with different frame rates and resolution can be grabbed, scaled and displayed picture-in-picture. The flexible video display controller allows the entire screen to be split into two separate sections with different contents able to be shown in these sections simultaneously.

Each section can be independently scrolled and in addition up to 3 more layers can be overlaid. With the Alpha blending feature that was present in the first device, allowing lower layers to be viewed at different levels of transparently, the device is certainly much more advanced, and it is also possible to display video pictures with alpha-blended graphics or text on top.
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The digital RGB output at 3x8 Bits allows digital displays to be connected at much higher quality compared with analogue.

Improvements in design
There have been additional improvements in the rendering engine as the device has been re-designed, making it 2-3 times faster than the Cremson. The geometrical co-processor takes the floating point processor calculations and prepares data for the rendering engine such as standard graphical calculations like Affin transformations. All devices in the family are fully software compatible to the Cremson.

Rose" also has four separate layers, as does its predecessor, with a resolution of up to 1024 x 768 pixels provided. All layers offer 16 Bit colour resolution true colour or 8 Bit colour resolution Indirect colour.

To adjust to severe temperature conditions and operating environments, the chip has a low power dissipation of less than 1W. Designed with the automotive industry in mind, it is able to operate in the temperature range of -40°C to 85°C.

Developed in 0.25 micron technology, some of the special features of the product, as with the Cremson, include an in-built anti-aliasing function, also Alpha-Blending and output synchronised to an external video signal, used for picture in picture to overlay graphics information, are supported. This is implemented in hardware, therefore allowing the system to operate more quickly.

Some additional features of the device include: an analogue RGB output; various screen resolutions from 320 x 234 to 1024 x 728; line pattern; chroma key; flat and gouraud shading; bi-linear texture mapping; double buffer management and two cursors.

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Future Family Devices
The family will continue in the future with Burgundy, Maroon and Vermillion, which will be targeted at STBs, mobile and entertainment systems. Lavender, which is being designed at the facility in Frankfurt, is a low cost, small display controller with a much more flexible interface.

In total there will be three product families with different functionalities, targeted towards: Infotainment in vehicles (Multimedia, Digital-Audio, DVD playing and TV); Navigation and mobile information and Dashboards and consumer information.

The evaluation board for the Rose will be available at the end of November, in addition to a modular starter kit incorporating the CPU main board plus peripherals, sample board and schematics, with the new devices in Mass Production by Q12001.

...ends (Ref: PR677)

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