Designing a high-definition FPGA-based graphics controller

Dominik Domanski, MYLIUM
EETimes (10/4/2011 12:24 PM EDT)

Recently, one of our clients came to us looking for a solution to display graphics on LCD monitors. We were informed that any data was to be is generated by a separate device and fed to the graphics controller using an external microcontroller. Our client already had the rest of the system made and working, so switching to some Android/PC based system wasn't an option. Also, the ability to add custom-made features was a big pro for an FPGA-based solution.

At first this sounded like a job for our LAVA 10 SVGA Controller, but then some additional requirements started to appear:

• The device needs to be able to display graphics in different resolutions starting from 1024x768 to 1920x1080
• It needs to have separate layers that can be switched on and off and can be merged together to create more complex picture.
• The layers need to have some transparency features
• A hardware cursor would be nice :-)

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