Anglia Designs launches quartet of graphics interface modules

The Anglia Designs graphics interface modules support Hitachi TX07, TX09, TX14, TX18 and SP14 families of TFT and STN displays and are supplied as daughterboards to standard STMicroelectronics STM3210E-EVAL and Microchip Explorer16 development boards. Anglia ships the modules with all the drivers and software required to drive the target display from these boards. This includes a graphics library and touch screen control software where appropriate. Using these modules, the software team can start writing and proving their code ahead of the availability of prototype hardware, whilst the hardware team can evaluate their design concept and demonstrate it to end-users of the system. Customers using the module as a reference design are supplied with CAD files, a Bill of Materials (BoM) and the relevant source code to use as a starting point for their development.

Anglia offers customers a complete package including the evaluation board for their chosen processor, the appropriate graphics interface module, a display adaptor and their choice of target display at a cost of £100 – £200 depending on the target display. It has released modules to interface each of Hitachi’s four major different industrial TFT display families to both the STM32 and the PIC evaluation boards.

Commenting, John Bowman, Divisional Marketing Manager, Anglia said, “Anglia Design engineers took the initiative to create this interface with the specific desire to help our customers get to market more quickly. We have validated our work with many customers who had varied requirements, and have received extremely positive feedback. This is a proven and working display interface design that will facilitate rapid implementation, development and testing of graphics TFT based systems.”

Anglia’s graphics interface modules and reference designs are supplied as daughterboards for STM and Microchip evaluation platforms. The STMicroelectronics STM3210E-EVAL platform supports the ARM Cortex-M3 based STM32F103Z microcontroller. The Microchip Explorer 16 is a low cost, efficient development board for 32-bit PIC32MX and the 16-bit PIC24F, PIC24H and dsPIC devices. The Anglia graphics interface module is compatible with all of these processors. Anglia supplies the module with the PIC32 starter kit and PIM adapter to create a ready to use package.

The display adaptor is based on the Solomon-Systech SSD1906 graphics controller, a very flexible graphics controller supporting 1,2,4,8, and 16bpp. This controller supports most of the common resolutions for portable applications and features hardware display rotation, covering various form factor requirements. The controller also features Virtual Display, Floating Window (variable size Overlay Window) and two Cursors to reduce the software manipulation. The 32-bit internal data path provides high bandwidth display memory for fast screen updates. Anglia expects to release two further display adaptors based on the Solomon-Systech SSD1963 shortly.

Anglia Designs is based on the expertise of Anglia’s in-house team of Field Application Engineers, and aims to help customers to market faster by developing and proving reference designs and evaluation boards in house. In addition to the Hitachi display adaptor modules, Anglia Designs has also released power designs, audio designs and wireless connectivity modules.