fpga lcd display made in china

“The warning shot, that FPGAs were on the way out, was delivered three years ago by Xilinx CEO Victor Peng. See Steve Leibson’s EE Journal article: Why does Xilinx say That its New 7nm Versal ‘ACAP’ isn’t an FPGA?“

“Tim, ‘pure’ FPGAs left the building two decades ago. The original Xilinx XC2064 was a ‘pure’ FPGA with nothing more on chip than programmable logic and interconnect. When FPGA vendors started cramming Ethernet ports, DSP slices, large SRAM blocks, and finally entire microprocessor subsystems into their parts, they ceased being ‘pure.’ However, the loss of purity came with a massive increase in utility.”

This interchange over LinkedIn got me thinking on two parallel tracks. First, there are mainstream FPGA vendors who still offer mostly “pure” FPGAs in the Tim Davis sense. Those vendors include Lattice – which bought FPGA vendor Silicon Blue in late 2011 – and Microchip, which bought Microsemi in 2018 and picked up former FPGA vendor Actel in the bargain. Even Intel and Xilinx continue to offer smaller, “low-end” FPGAs in their Cyclone and Spartan product lines respectively, although they’re not really all that “pure” in Tim Davis’s sense, which I take to mean looking more like FPGAs from the 1990s and earlier.

But I found my second train of thought more interesting for the purposes of this article. That track took me (or at least my mind) across the Pacific Ocean to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), where a few semiconductor startups have dipped a toe into the FPGA pool. I’d read about several FPGA vendors working to create a domestic FPGA supply in the PRC, and I’d never seriously studied them. This seemed to be the right time to investigate.

A bit of research turned up the following five FPGA companies based in the PRC. With a bit of Google elbow grease, I was able to find the URLs for each company:

The FPGAs from these companies are mostly “pure” in the Tim Davis sense: they look like they could have been developed in the 1990s. They’re largely arrays of programmable logic, based mostly on 4- and 5-input LUTs, and most offer only parallel I/O pins with adjustable voltage levels (with a few exceptions).

(Note: Logic-level translation was an early feature added to “pure” FPGAs as they started to absorb functions from other chips typically found next to the FPGA on a circuit board. Adding level translation to the FPGA was an effort to deliver more value to design engineers and to capture a larger share of the system BOM dollars. The addition of on-chip I/O level translation to FPGAs killed a rather large business in level-translation chips, or level shifters, for more than one chip vendor. I’m thinking about you, Texas Instruments and Sprague Semiconductor.)

A few of the devices offered by these PRC FPGA vendors incorporate “high-speed” transceivers, but the maximum data rates offered are much lower than the transceiver speeds available in devices from US-based FPGA companies.

The FPGAs from these five PRC vendors also incorporate block RAMs (BRAMs) and some multipliers. Except for the very preliminary info on the Seal 5000 family from Xi’an Intelligent Silicon Tech, these multipliers are not the larger ones now found in the most current DSP slices offered by the big guys. They’re 18×18-bit multipliers found in the earlier “pure” FPGAs. The exception here is the Seal 5000 device family, which has larger 25×18-bit multipliers that can be split into two 18×18-bit multipliers.

Some of these FPGAs from PRC vendors incorporate 32-bit microprocessor cores, which makes them less “pure” from Tim Davis’s perspective but, in my opinion, far more useful for real designs. Every design project now uses at least one microprocessor; they’re just so darn handy. So if you need a microprocessor and an FPGA to meet your design goals, you might as well get them on one device if possible. And if you can get big chunks of SDRAM and Flash in the same package, so much the better! It’ll save board space.

You’ll find that the Web sites of these vendors and their data sheets are largely written in Mandarin Chinese, which makes a ton of sense if you assume that these companies mainly target the domestic PRC market. So, if you want to use these FPGAs, you’d best be able to understand Mandarin in addition to Verilog or VHDL. That’s also true for the development tools accompanying these FPGAs.

Summaries and a quick analysis of the FPGA families I was able to find on the Web sites of the five FPGA companies in the PRC listed above appear in the table below. I readily admit that the table is incomplete, which reflects the state of the data sheets I found, the mixed use of Mandarin and English in the data sheets (and my inability to read Mandarin), translation issues with Google Translate (“Nuclear Voltage” indeed!), some obvious omissions in the data sheets, and a typo or two. Still, there’s plenty of information to form some general impressions.

The FPGA offerings in the table seem to fall into two broad groups. The FPGAs from Shanghai Anlogic Infotec, Shenhzen Pango Microsystems, and Xi’an Intelligent Silicon Tech tend to be larger, and most include some high-speed transceivers. The FPGAs from AGM and Gowin tend to be smaller in terms of the number of LUTs, BRAM bits, and multipliers – although Gowin’s offerings are clearly getting larger given the larger FPGAs in the GW2A family. AGM and Gowin offer very interesting FPGAs that incorporate SDRAM and NOR Flash storage packaged with the FPGA.

Gowin also offers FPGAs with embedded 32-bit processors, either the ARC processor core (now available in the DesignWare library from Synopsys) or the Arm Cortex-M3 core, which is a capable embedded microprocessor. The Xi’an Intelligent Silicon Tech Seal 5000 FPGA family has one member with a 32-bit “microcontroller core,” which it calls an “M3.” Quite likely, that’s an Arm Cortex-M3 core, but with the lack of information on the Web page, I’m just guessing here.

If you look at the FPGAs in the above table, you might conclude that they offer little serious competition to the more advanced FPGA offerings from Intel, Lattice, Microchip, or Xilinx. I don’t believe that’s the initial intent, however. These are capable FPGAs in their own right, and these five companies obviously cater to the PRC’s domestic market, given the language emphasis on the Web sites and the documentation. Viewed in that light, these are very interesting initial offerings from five domestic PRC FPGA vendors. Bigger and better FPGAs from these companies are sure to follow, as evidenced by the early information about the Seal 5000 family from Xi’an Intelligent Silicon Tech.

I suppose you might ask if these companies will make sales headway in the rest of the world outside of the PRC. Gowin has established sales offices in many countries, for example, and clearly wishes to sell its FPGAs on the broader world stage. The key to that success will be excellent translations of the company’s FPGA documentation, responsive support for the company’s FPGA design tools, and ecosystem support in countries beyond the PRC. I believe the lack of adequate translated documentation and development tool support needlessly restricted many Japanese microprocessors and microcontrollers from broader use worldwide outside of Japan; FPGAs have similar requirements. We’ll have to wait and see what happens. I’m quite eager to see the next moves and new device generations from these FPGA companies.

The panel uses a 30-pin connector (which plugs into a port on the mainboard). The 30 pin connector then splits into two: one set of wires goes to the inverter for the backlight, and the other set containing the LVDS & EDID wires goes to the PCB on the LCD panel.

FPD-Link is a high speed digital video interface that is used to transmit video from the GPU (laptop/tablet/TV motherboard) to the display panel. FPD-Link uses LVDS (Low Voltage Differential Signalling), which transmits bits of data as differences in voltages between the 2 twisted pair wires. LVDS reduces the generation of electromagnetic noise, and due to the twisted pair cables and differential signalling, is resistant to common mode noise as well. Note that most literature refers to FPD-Link as "LVDS", although LVDS is just the electrical standard, and FPD-Link defines the signalling/packet structure.

From what I"ve read here and here, FPD-Link is being phased out and replaced by embedded Display Port. As panel resolutions increase, LVDS requires multiple channels (eg at 1080p60, FPD-Link requires around 4 or 5 channels @ ~135Mhz), but eDP can do with only 1 or 2 channels, and much higher signalling rates (1.6, 2.7, 5.4 Gbits). eDP would be interesting to try, but it would need a more expensive FPGA that has Gigabit transceivers.

I then turned to the the laptop mainboard, since if there was a LVDS transmitter, I could find a way to route the signals from the FPGA to the transmitter. I managed to find schematics for the laptop, but the LVDS signals were being routed directly from the Intel Chipset. I checked the datasheet for the chipset (an Intel 965 Express), and it confirmed that the Chipset was infact generating LVDS. This meant that it wouldn"t be possible to tap the data lines of any LVDS transmitter, and I would need to find a way of generating it.

I was searching for LCD addon boards (PMOD, FMC etc.) to see how the signalling & conversion is implemented, when I found a forum post detailing how Avnet"s 7-inch Zed Touch Display Kit generates a LVDS signal using the Zynq"s TMDS33 outputs.

The LCD panel uses a CFL backlight (it"s from an old laptop), so my first task was to turn on the backlight. I referred to the pinout of the connector, and the schematics of the laptop main board to try to figure out how it was being controlled.

The next blog post LCD panel + FPGA with an HDMI sink = External Display will continue from here: implement a HDMI sink, and display the received video on the LCD panel.

In recent time, China domestic companies like BOE have overtaken LCD manufacturers from Korea and Japan. For the first three quarters of 2020, China LCD companies shipped 97.01 million square meters TFT LCD. And China"s LCD display manufacturers expect to grab 70% global LCD panel shipments very soon.

BOE started LCD manufacturing in 1994, and has grown into the largest LCD manufacturers in the world. Who has the 1st generation 10.5 TFT LCD production line. BOE"s LCD products are widely used in areas like TV, monitor, mobile phone, laptop computer etc.

TianMa Microelectronics is a professional LCD and LCM manufacturer. The company owns generation 4.5 TFT LCD production lines, mainly focuses on making medium to small size LCD product. TianMa works on consult, design and manufacturing of LCD display. Its LCDs are used in medical, instrument, telecommunication and auto industries.

TCL CSOT (TCL China Star Optoelectronics Technology Co., Ltd), established in November, 2009. TCL has six LCD panel production lines commissioned, providing panels and modules for TV and mobile products. The products range from large, small & medium display panel and touch modules.

Everdisplay Optronics (Shanghai) Co.,Ltd.(EDO) is a company dedicated to production of small-to-medium AMOLED display and research of next generation technology. The company currently has generation 4.5 OLED line.

Established in 1996, Topway is a high-tech enterprise specializing in the design and manufacturing of industrial LCD module. Topway"s TFT LCD displays are known worldwide for their flexible use, reliable quality and reliable support. More than 20 years expertise coupled with longevity of LCD modules make Topway a trustworthy partner for decades. CMRC (market research institution belonged to Statistics China before) named Topway one of the top 10 LCD manufactures in China.

The Company engages in the R&D, manufacturing, and sale of LCD panels. It offers LCD panels for notebook computers, desktop computer monitors, LCD TV sets, vehicle-mounted IPC, consumer electronics products, mobile devices, tablet PCs, desktop PCs, and industrial displays.

Founded in 2008，Yunnan OLiGHTEK Opto-Electronic Technology Co.,Ltd. dedicated themselves to developing high definition AMOLED (Active Matrix-Organic Light Emitting Diode) technology and micro-displays.

Are you aware of the existence of GalaxyCore Shanghai Limited Corporation? Are you aware of the various awards that these companies have won since their inception in 2003? If not, you may be curious about what makes these companies successful. After all, China is home to some of the most innovative sensor companies in the world. The country is also home to several of the top IC companies in the world, including GalaxyCore. GalaxyCore Inc. design and manufacture CMOS image sensors for various applications. These chips convert captured optical images into digital signals. The company sells both CMOS image sensors and display driver ICs.

The company’s core competencies include the development of CMOS image sensors, design of display driver chips, and efficient operation. The company has headquarters in Shanghai City, China. GalaxyCore has made impressive progress in the last few years. GalaxyCore’s proprietary CIS core technologies allow for high-quality, compact products with low cost and power consumption.

Founded in 2003, GalaxyCore is a leading supplier of high-performance CMOS image sensors and Display Driver ICs. Its products are useful in many mobile terminals and non-mobile electronics, such as smartwatches. Moreover, the company also produces and sells a variety of semiconductors. The company specializes in image sensors, DDI display chips, and LCD driver ICs. Its products apply to mobile phones, consumer electronics, industrial applications, and automotive electronics.

We’re always impressed with the number of laptop displays we’re able to pick out of the trash. Most of the time the computer is borked beyond repair so we end up with a lot of functional but unusable LCD panels. As a service to us all, [EiNSTeiN_] figured out how to control an LCD panel using a cheap homebrew FPGA board.

LCD panels don’t use a simple protocol like VGA for turning pixels on and off. Instead, the very high-speed LVDS is used. LVDS is beyond the capabilities of simple microprocessors, so [EiNSTeiN_] built himself a clone of an XuLA FPGA prototyping board and set to work. After figuring out the signal lines to the panel, [EiNSTeiN_] pored over the timing diagrams for the LVDS controller and the LCD panel. From the data sheets, he figured out data is usually sent to the panel at about 500 MHz. The homebrew FPGA board couldn’t manage that speed so [EiNSTeiN_] cut the FPGA clock in half.

While LCD’s 60 fps refresh rate was reduced to 30 fps, [EiNSTeiN_] says there’s only a little flicker. Not bad for something that could have easily been trashed.

The Bright Power Semiconductor Company is a Chinese electronics manufacturing company. This company specializes in microprocessors and flash memory, as well as integrating circuits for quantum computing and artificial intelligence. It also develops OLED displays and circuit design firms. Bright Power Semiconductor Company in China is a top choice for investors and traders looking to buy or sell semiconductor stocks.

The company focuses on energy-efficient ICs for LED general illumination, LCD TV backlighting, and consumer electronics. Its product portfolio includes four product lines, with plans to expand its R&D efforts and ramp up production. The company has headquarters in Shenzhen and is an emerging Chinese leader in advanced ICs. In addition, the company addresses a number of high-growth segments in the LED industry, such as wireless charging systems.

Maxic Technology Corporation develops and manufactures integrated circuits for LED lighting drivers and analog-based power systems. These circuits are typically useful in consumer electronics, LCD television backlighting, and LED general lighting. The company sells four main product lines. The investment will ramp up production and expand R&D. The company’s ICs address several high-growth segments of the LED industry.

As a 2inch IPS display module with a resolution of 240 * 320, it uses an SPI interface for communication. The LCD has an internal controller with basic functions, which can be used to draw points, lines, circles, and rectangles, and display English, Chinese as well as pictures.

The 2inch LCD uses the PH2.0 8PIN interface, which can be connected to the Raspberry Pi according to the above table: (Please connect according to the pin definition table. The color of the wiring in the picture is for reference only, and the actual color shall prevail.)

The LCD supports 12-bit, 16-bit, and 18-bit input color formats per pixel, namely RGB444, RGB565, and RGB666 three color formats, this demo uses RGB565 color format, which is also a commonly used RGB format.

For most LCD controllers, the communication mode of the controller can be configured, usually with an 8080 parallel interface, three-wire SPI, four-wire SPI, and other communication methods. This LCD uses a four-wire SPI communication interface, which can greatly save the GPIO port, and the communication speed will be faster.

Note: Different from the traditional SPI protocol, the data line from the slave to the master is hidden since the device only has display requirement.

Framebuffer uses a video output device to drive a video display device from a memory buffer containing complete frame data. Simply put, a memory area is used to store the display content, and the display content can be changed by changing the data in the memory.

If you need to draw pictures, or display Chinese and English characters, we provide some basic functions here about some graphics processing in the directory RaspberryPi\c\lib\GUI\GUI_Paint.c(.h).

Set points of the display position and color in the buffer: here is the core GUI function, processing points display position and color in the buffer.

The fill color of a certain window in the image buffer: the image buffer part of the window filled with a certain color, usually used to fresh the screen into blank, often used for time display, fresh the last second of the screen.

Display time: in the image buffer,use (Xstart Ystart) as the left vertex, display time,you can choose Ascii visual character font, font foreground color, font background color.;

2. The module_init() function is automatically called in the INIT () initializer on the LCD, but the module_exit() function needs to be called by itself

Python has an image library PIL official library link, it do not need to write code from the logical layer like C, can directly call to the image library for image processing. The following will take 1.54inch LCD as an example, we provide a brief description for the demo.

Note: Each character library contains different characters; If some characters cannot be displayed, it is recommended that you can refer to the encoding set ro used.

As shown in Figure 1, has the electronic theodolite that Chinese and English shows, which comprises at least and show housing 2, place transit circuit 3 that shows in the housing 2 and the LCD display 1 that shows on the housing 2, LCD display 1 comprises vertical angle sign indicating number section 101, horizontal angle sign indicating number section 102, left side sign indicating number section 103, right sign indicating number section 104 and electric weight sign indicating number section 105, vertical angle sign indicating number section 101 on transit circuit 3 output terminals and LCD display 1 window, horizontal angle sign indicating number section 102, left side sign indicating number section 103, right sign indicating number section 104 and electric weight sign indicating number section 105 are electrically connected, and vertical angle sign indicating number section 101 and horizontal angle sign indicating number section 102 parts are vertical angle viewing area 106 and level angle viewing areas 107 of transit circuit output.LCD display 1 window area is 64mm * 22mm.

Left side sign indicating number section 103 be that the prompting of left-handed key function shows, right sign indicating number section 104 be that the prompting of dextrorotation key function shows.When the needs angle is shown as " left side " when revolving function, as being shown as " left side " on the display screen, then expression angle this moment is shown as left-handed function; Otherwise click left-handed/dextrorotation key once, then just point out horizontal angle to show on the screen and become " left side " by " right side ", counting switched to " left side " by functional requirement and revolved pattern this moment.And for example, when needs horizontal angle demonstration 0 is spent, touch by " zero setting " key and realize Protection Counter Functions, double-click this key instrument " horizontal angle " display line complete zero and show.Other each button to the selection demonstration of viewing area and function class is not seemingly given unnecessary details here one by one.

Fig. 2 is the schematic diagram that has the transit circuit 3 of LCD lcd segment driving circuit, and liquid crystal display drive circuit is PCF8576, and treatment circuit is selected PCF8574 for use, and PCF8576 is electrically connected with LCD.PCF8574, transit sensing circuit Z1 adopt universal serial bus to be connected with PCF8576, at the I/O of PCF8574 mouth difference connection mode key, slope key, zero setting key, locking key, a left side/right button.In order to satisfy user"s form reading use habit, adopt duplicate rows LCD to show, vertical angle/horizontal angle display reminding is expressed as Chinese character, with functional representation such as left-handed/dextrorotation horizontal angle, locking, horizontal angle zero setting is the circuit design of Chinese display mode etc., chips such as PCF8574T, PCF8576CT have wherein been selected for use, because this partial circuit belongs to the common application technology and do not do too much explanation here.

The utility model distributes English display LCD by the redesign to its SEGMENT sign indicating number and COMMON sign indicating number, logical relation by each display field of design layout, and corresponding corresponding Chinese operating function requirement, by mechanical changeover mechanism design cleverly, obtain being shown as the full Chinese display design sketch of 64mm * 42mm.

The default FPGA load provides additional peripherals, such as SD Card socket and serial ports. A video core is not included in the default load. In addition, the FPGA can be configured on the fly to either load a 16-bit PC/104 bus on the 64-pin PC/104 connector or use it as general purpose I/O lines.

The TS-7350 and TS-7370 are very similar products. The TS-7370 adds a second 10/100 ethernet port instead of a DB9 connector for the COM1 port. The TS-7350 is compatible with the TS-ENC720 enclosure, but there is currently no enclosure available for the TS-7370. Also, the TS-7370 is only available with 64MB RAM minimum and the power input connector appears in a different position. Other than this, hardware, FPGA load and software solutions are compatible.

The TS-7370 is a Arm9-based embedded computer designed to provide flexibility through the integration of a programmable 5K LUT LatticeXP2 FPGA. This product is an LCD-ready computer because the FPGA is connected to a dedicated RAM framebuffer, meaning that a custom video core can be included on the FPGA to provide an interface to most color TFT-LCD panels. Since the 64-pin PC/104 signals are connected straight to the FPGA, the video signals are brought out through PC/104 connector, allowing customers to design their own physical video interfaces to their LCD displays of choice. Although the video core is not included on the default FPGA load, embeddedTS can easily modify our TS-VIDCORE to meet the requirements of our customers through a custom FPGA load. We can also assist you with the design of your LCD interface card.

TS-7390 engine and a 7-inch color TFT-LCD panel with TouchScreen interface. Contact embeddedTS should you need more information about custom LCD FPGA designs or assistance regarding LCD integration.

The TS-7350/TS-7370 provides multiple COM ports using both TTL (2 total) and RS-232 (5 total) levels. Two optional RS-485 ports are available with DMX/RDM support. The EP9302 processor provides two COM ports (TTL Console at the JTAG header and RS-232 at COM1 header). The remaining COM ports are provided by the FPGA through the proprietary XUART core and are 9-bit serial capable. Please refer to the manual for further information.

The TS-7370 SBC boots to Linux 2.6 from an SD Card using the proprietary TS-SDBOOT bootup firmware residing in FPGA ROM memory in about 1 to 1.5 seconds, depending on the SD Card speed and brand. The SD Card must contain a Linux Kernel image, a initial ram disk image and a valid Linux root filesystem. The ultra-fast Linux bootup solution was optimized for speed and includes kernel, initrd and filesystem (Busybox) tweaks. Since this board boots to an initrd (initial ram disk) with a read-only mounted filesystem, it is possible to have something other than a shell prompt running after bootup by editing the /linuxrc shell script on the initrd. Additional TS-7370 software features include:

ATOM Display Lite is an all-in-one display driver kit. Use FPGA to simulate traditional SPI TFT-LCD Data output. This kit supports images at a maximum resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels (720P). Built-in LT8618SX RGB to HDMI chip supports wide range HDMI signal output. Integrate 2.4G Wi-Fi, with 4M Flash + 520KB SRAM. So small yet powerful, which can replace the traditional display driving solution.