Industrial control and consumer product trends

People are accustomed to high-definition and colorful images and videos after the rise of smartphones. Similarly, people are no longer satisfied with the monochrome and straightforward display of industrial control and consumer products. Apart from catching the audience’s attention, a color display makes products look richer. The same is true to controls, whose simple press-button design is no more the first choice of users. And interaction has become the primary concern. If manufacturers want to bring users a richer experience, color and interactive display will add value to products.

What do users care about?

From the user’s point of view, what do users care about color displays? Without a doubt, it’s the experience of feeling. What are the sources of senses then? They are the vision (eyes), sound (ears), and touch (hands).

The experience of feeling begins with a vision, as users wish to see colorful things and beautiful shapes. How can manufacturers make images look more comfortable and beautiful then? There are two significant factors.

1. Screen refreshing rate: When displaying fast motions, the sense of lag generates on screens with a lower refreshing rate. Due to the persistence of vision, 30 fps should be the minimum refreshing rate.
2. Color presentation: Color bit depth determines the gradation effect of colors. That is, the greater the bit depth is, the higher the color intensity will be. Therefore, a 24-bit color display is an essential requirement for displaying images in greater detail.

What should be considered in hardware design?

Based on the above two phenomena, what should we do to optimize hardware design?

The TFT LCD should be equipped with the following:

1. A 24-bit RGB888 color interface.
2. Output control for quick screen refreshing from the hardware.
3. Built-in a 2D graphics accelerator to speed up graphics capacity.
4. Built-in high-capacity graphics display a cache of 2MB minimum for the TFT LCD controller to switch display contents more efficiently.

What color display problems have Nuvoton solved with its applications? What are the benefits?

Based on the above requirements, Nuvoton’s N9H series helps enrich color display from the hardware.

Apart from a direct 24-bit TFT LCD output that does not require CPU processing, the entire N9H series is equipped with a built-in 2D graphics accelerator to make graphics processing smoother. Most importantly, up to 128MB of DDR is packed in the LQFP using a multi-chip package (MCP) to reduce the difficulty in hardware design and manufacturing significantly. To expand the scope of the application, Nuvoton provides free emWin GUI graphics software for software engineers to design quality GUIs more quickly, to make product development faster and more competitive.