Household appliances like Washers and Refrigerators are undergoing transformations in how they interact with consumers. Small, character-based LCD displays, themselves relatively new in washing machines built over the last few years, are giving way to color touch screen graphic LCDs. These displays, apart from taking over the functions of electro-mechanical pushbuttons through touch screen buttons, also instruct the consumers visually in methods of loading, wash temperature and wash program selection for different fabrics and garments.
Refrigerators have begun to appear with large graphic LCD screens offering features once considered esoteric. They include Entertainment (TV, DVD), Home Control integration, Videophone integration, Digital picture frame applications and even Internet surfing!
White goods manufacturers strive to differentiate their products by offering innovative new graphical consumer interfaces. They require the ability to program touch screens to be configured for touch-button menu selection. A requirement typically in conflict with the very low cost points of washers is that they also must permit display of video instructions to consumers
White goods manufacturers can have product lines that range from very low cost machines with character based or “text” LCD displays, to ultra high-end machines with large TFT LCD screens capable of displaying video. The machines typically are based on microcontrollers for simple I/O. A major design goal is to keep the same controller for all washers / refrigerators and for all displays types.
Through LCD-Pro, Lattice offers manufacturers of white goods a ready-made industry standard AMBA bus architecture and predefined library of graphics IP cores in a single FPGA.
Low-cost System-On-Chip (SoC) solutions available in the market do not offer interfaces to drive a wide range of display screens. Application software often needs to be changed significantly from that supplied as reference. They also do not provide support for MPEG4 or media. For these application designers normally need to make a big step to migrate the application from microcontroller to PC, resulting in significantly increased costs. Embedded PC platforms are not suited to driving small TFT displays, making them useless as a single standardized platform for machines lines with small to large displays. Moreover, an x86 platform with the traditionally available OS for it is not considered stable enough for a household machine operated by both adults and children not necessarily familiar with computers.
Lattice LCD-Pro Advanced Touch Screen Video Graphics Controller has none of the problems associated with SoC or embedded PCs, and enables system architects to design ultra low cost white goods applications while retaining the video graphics sophistication of higher cost platforms.
LCD-Pro also enables designers to use the same platform form very low-cost to high-end appliances.
© Lattice Semiconductor Corporation 2012
