2D Graphics Processor for Wearables/IoT

Overview

Innovation and architectural brilliance bring performance graphics rendering to the smallest and most power conscious embedded display devices. Minimal silicon area of only 0.11mm2 (@28nm), lowest MCU utilization of less than 5% and GPU power consumption of under 1mw, makes NEMA®|pico XS truly an agile GPU superstar.
 

Key Features

  • HARWARE COMPONENTS
    • Programmable Shader engine with a VLIW instruction set
    • Command list based DMAs to minimize CPU overhead
    • Primitives Rasterizer
    • Texture Mapping Unit
    • Display Controller (optional)
  • IMAGE TRANSFORMATION
    • Texture mapping
    • Point sampling
    • Bilinear filtering
    • Blit support
    • Rotation any angle
    • Mirroring
    • Stretch (independently on x and y axis)
    • Source and/or destination color keying
    • Format conversions on the fly
  • BLENDING SUPPORT
    • Fully Programmable Alpha blending modes (source and destination)
    • Source/Destination color keying
  • DRAWING PRIMITIVES
    • Pixel / Line drawing
    • Filled rectangles
    • Triangles (Gouraud Shaded)
    • Quadrilateral
  • TEXT RENDERING SUPPORTS
    • Bitmap antialiased (A1 / A2 / A4 / A8 )
    • Font Kerning
    • Unicode (UTF8)
  • COLOR FORMATS
    • 32-bit RGBA8888 / BGRA8888 / ABGR8888
    • 24-bit RGB
    • 16-bit RGBA5551 / RGB565
    • 8-bit ?8 / L8 / RGB332
    • 4-bit A4 / L4
    • 2-bit A2 / L2
    • 1-bit A1 / L1
    • TSCTM** (Optional) (Read Only)
    • YUV Read Only
    • ** Think Silicon Compression (proprietary)

Benefits

  • Performance per mWatt per Dollar
  • The NEMA®|GPU-Series performance per silicon area per clock frequency is unrivaled in its class. NEMA®|p has been designed to perform favorable against these critical performance benchmarks. As a result NEMA®|p uses 87% less active and 98% less idle power and has a 4 times smaller silicon footprint (compared to the competition), leading to significant cost reduction.
  • Think Silicon's proprietary 4bpp (bits-per-pixel) real-time frame-buffer compression (TSCTMFB), the 6bpp texture compression and real-time de-compression (TSCTMT) benefits architects and finance controllers equally. The compressed images and the software libraries are so small in size that they fit into the internal SoC memory. As a result, expensive external DDR memory can be minimized or entirely eliminated. This reduces the SoC idle power consumption about impressive 98%, extends system battery life about 10 times and lowers the overall BOM cost. The combined performance and cost advantages make NEMA®|p to a Performance-Power-Cost leader in the class of 2D GPU's.

Block Diagram

2D Graphics Processor for Wearables/IoT Block Diagram

Video

Nema|pico accelerating DirectFB - df_dok benchmark

Applications

  • A fast 2D GUI interface and the NEMA®|pico XS is the perfect candidate to support entry level IoT-platforms, wearable and embedded devices with low cost and ultra-low power requirements supporting SoCs with a 32/64-bit MCU (e.g. ARM®| Cortex®| M processors) and provide fluid 2D graphics experience for a wide range of applications.
  • Developers are able to create compelling 2D Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and software applications with ultra-long battery life at a significantly lower cost for power-memory-area constrained IoT devices.

Technical Specifications

Foundry, Node
synthesizable RTL
Maturity
silicon proven
Availability
now
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Semiconductor IP