fpga4fun tft lcd driver manufacturer

First: There are several types of cheap touchscreens: resistive and capacitive (intro from 3m). And under touchscreen I mean touch panels (digitizers) - the thin multilayer panels which feels touches, but don"t display anything. Touchscreens can be combined with LCD/OLED screens to get display with touch capability. Resistive touchscreens are sensitive to pressure, and you can use any stick to press them, they also had problems with multitouch (sensing several touches at same time). Capacitive touchscreens are often used now in smartphones (since iPhone), and they sense capacitance of human body, working only with fingers or special conductive styli.

So, our second step is the touchscreen controller ASIC: the device between microcontroller or FPGA and the touchscreen. Controller will do all needed magic to detect touches and translate information about them into some digital protocol, like COM (RS-232) or USB in ancient controllers for PC, or simple SPI and I2C for microcontrollers and FPGAs (you should know how to implement SPI/I2C for FPGA; the fpga4fun site may help you: spi, i2c). Many small touchscreens sold now may include some controller, integrated into their PCB or flex wire.

Third step: if you want to make prototype with LCD display and touchscreen, especially with small size LCD (up to 6″), the touch panel may be already integrated into display. And because virtually all LCD have the controller to output some information to display (again, fpga4fun has some introduction into using LCD with FPGAs), they probably will have integrated touchscreen controller too.

Now we can start speak about your case: "what I could buy". If you already have FPGA board, you can search for some LCD+touchscreen for some popular hardware prototyping platform, e.g. for ardoino or raspberry pi. For example, adafruit shop has both separate touch panels, lines and buttons even without controller: http://www.adafruit.com/category/60. Also they have several LCD+touch like 2.8" TFT with STMPE610 touch controller (both SPI and I2C, selectable via pin). There are several on sparkfun.com too. Make sure that you understand how to connect the LCD to FPGA, both electrical and protocol requirements. Check is there touch controller, or you need to implement it in the FPGA with ADC (and there should be ADC on your FPGA board).

If you don"t have FPGA board or if you have no any FPGA experience, it can be better (and costly) to find FPGA kit with optional LCD+touch, but not from chinese vendors. There are lot of chinese kits in cheap section of ebay"s search "fpga touch", but they may have not so good tutorials and demo projects as right vendors. There are 7" kit from Terasic (2000 USD, VEEK-MT-C5SoC), or 7" 250USD LCD+touchpanel module for 1800 USD DE3 or 600USD DE2 FPGA boards. And for Digilent, there is 150 USD VmodTFT 4.3" TFT+touch (manual) compatible with Digilent boards with VHDCI connector, like 300 USD Nexys 3 board, 450 USD Atlys board, or 1100 USD Genesys superboard.

Digital Blocks TFT LCD Controller reference design enables you to accelerate the design-in of TFT LCD panel displays in your system. The reference design centers on the Digital Blocks DB9000AVLN TFT LCD Controller intellectual property (IP) core, which is available in netlist or VHDL/Verilog HDL register transfer level (RTL) formats.

The DB9000AVLN core contains an Avalon® Memory-Mapped system interconnect for interfacing to the Nios® II embedded processor and SDRAM or SRAM controllers (either memory can serve as the frame buffer). Software supplied with this reference design runs on the Nios II embedded processor to place an image in the frame buffer memory and invokes the DB9000AVLN core to drive the LCD panel.

Using the Intel® Quartus® Design Software, you can instantiate the TFT LCD Controller reference design in a Cyclone®, Cyclone® II, or Cyclone® III FPGA development kit. See the Demonstrated Intel® Technology section for a complete list of supported Intel® FPGA development kits.

You can connect your LCD panel to the Intel FPGA development kit with the fabrication of an appropriate cable. Please contact Digital Blocks for more details.

What are FPGAs used for in preference to microcontrollers? There are several answers to this question. Logic consolidation (where one replaces a number of digital ICs with a single IC) is a big reason for using FPGAs. Due to the large number of logic elements (LEs) and I/O pin resources in an FPGA, a number of functions can be placed inside the same FPGA. For example, an ADC controller, a number processor, and a display driver (among other functions) can be placed inside an FPGA. Many commercial products use FPGAs in this way to make products smaller, lighter, and cheaper.

Several books and websites offer help and guidance to FPGA users at all experience levels. Chief among these are FPGA manufacturer’s own websites where one can get an enormous amount of free learning resources targeting all levels of expertise; www.fpga4fun.com is a popular website with several introductory and mid-level projects for hobbyists to build.

TFT LCDs have become the norm for small-to-medium size displays in a variety of products within industrial, medical, POS and consumer applications. Compared to passive-addressed monochrome LCDs, TFT displays offer higher contrast, wider viewing angles, faster response time and full color. And, TFT LCDs are now on cost parity with similar size passive LCD displays.

A typical TFT LCD module product consists of a TFT LCD panel, one or more COG (chip-on-glass) driver ICs, a backlight unit, and an interface FPC. Several TFT display interface technologies coexist today. Picking the right technology depends on specific end-product concerns. Most often the display panel input will dictate that choice since TFT panels are designed to be COG bonding pad compatible with a very limited number of driver ICs. This article discusses the interfaces between TFT LCD modules and the typical CPUs found in embedded applications.

Typical TFT interfaces are determined by the particular TFT panel size and resolution, as shown in the below table. HDMI and eDP require interface converting boards and generally are not used for small to medium-size TFT LCDs.TFT LCD SizesResolutionsTypical Interfaces UsedUp to 3.5″128×160 to 240×320SPI, parallel MPU or RGB

The LCD controller signals are two types: data signals and control signals. The data signals are connected to the LCD data bus and depend on the LCD color depth (8-bit, 9-bit, 16-bit, 18-bit). The control signals are used to define the operation type (read or write), and whether the operation involves in addressing LCD registers or the display RAM.

LVDS interfacing has several benefits for TFT displays. It is much less susceptible to EMI and crosstalk issues, allowing the transmitting device to be located farther from the display. Also, LVDS generally consumes less power, pin counts are lower and there are far fewer worries about signal integrity.

Modern TFT driver ICs are highly integrated chips combining the source driver, gate driver and timing controller (TCON) – as well as other functional circuits such as memory, power circuit, and image processors – into one single IC die. Some driver ICs support multiple interfaces that are selectable on the module FPC or through initialization code firmware.

As a designer and manufacturer of custom LCD modules, New Vision Display works with customers to select the most appropriate and cost-effective TFT display and electronic interface solution for their particular requirement. New Vision Display has nearly 30 years of industry experience as one of the world’s leading TFT LCD screen manufacturers.

The Papilio FPGA shield embraces this idea but provides a more general purpose platform that will allow Arduino interfaces to be created for *any* type of hardware. VGA, TFT LCD’s, HDMI/DVI are just the examples that come to mind first.