Vending has gone through significant changes over the past few years. Traditional vending machine user-interfaces used to be based on low cost character LCD displays and electro-mechanical pushbuttons. New generations of innovative free-standing vending machines now incorporate colorful displays, with on-screen text and overlaid video. They incorporate built-in LCD panels which function as touch screens, displays for showing product information, intuitive graphical consumer interfaces and advertising platforms.
Vending machine 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 product selection. A requirement typically in conflict with the very low cost points of these machines is that they also must permit video advertising.
Vending machine 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 and payment system interfaces. A major design goal is to keep the same controller for all vending machines and for all displays types.
Through LCD-Pro, Lattice offers manufacturers of vending machines 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 largely unattended application continuously operated by the public.
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 vending machine 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 vending machines.
© Lattice Semiconductor Corporation 2012
