Toshiba Electronics Europe publicized its newest gadget in the company’s Capricorn family of highly integrated, scalable system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for driving and supervising high-quality automotive displays. Targeted at digital instrument clusters and head up display (HUD) applications, Capricorn-F is the first Capricorn device to offer support for 3D graphics and to incorporate APIX® Gigabit digital serial data link transmission.
The integrated five-plane graphics display controller (GDC) is harmonized by the onboard 3D and 2D graphics engines. These engines support OpenGL-ES 1.1 3D graphics providing features such as alpha blending, transformation, blitting, rotation and scaling. These contribute to enhanced display output and ensure smooth display of changing graphics, while Toshiba’s proprietary adaptive strobe compensation method (ASCM) delivers high quality display of graphics associated with fast-rotating instrument cluster pointers. The graphics engines also provide designers with programmable, selective full colour correction.
Capricorn-F, which is appropriate for WVGA and DVGA TFT displays, will considerably decrease the difficulty and component count of a variety of instrument cluster applications. Full compatibility with the CPU core architecture of other members of the Toshiba Capricorn family allows for software re-use and supports scalability across different display applications, display sizes and resolutions.
Toshiba’s new SoC combines a powerful 64-bit RISC processor, embedded display memory, dedicated 2D and 3D graphics capabilities and a variety of application-specific peripherals and interfaces supporting direct TFT panel control. Embedded DRAM for program and graphic content eliminates the need for external RAM and (by reducing external PCB tracks) simplifies EMC design. An additional memory controller supports applications requiring more memory.
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