Building Automation consists of a wide range of display applications: from touch-screen operator panels for HVAC control, Lighting and Temperature (Energy) control, Elevator monitoring and safety, Occupant and visitor traffic (crowd) control, intelligent use of shared resources such as conference rooms. An emerging requirement in Building Automation LCD Panels is the ability to display video: (a) native to automation system for product advertising in hotel elevators and announcements in public and office buildings and (b) overlay video from internal and external surveillance cameras.
Building Automation Panel manufacturers strive to differentiate their products by offering innovative new graphical interfaces. They require the ability to program touch screens to be custom configured for buttons and alarms. A requirement typically in conflict with the very low cost points of these machines is that they also must permit video advertising. Sophisticated Building Automation systems also interface with enterprise scheduling software for displaying conference room reservations.
Building Automation Panel 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 with simple I/O interfaces. A major design goal is to keep the same controller for all Building Automation Panels and for all displays types. 
Through LCD-Pro, Lattice offers manufacturers of Building Automation Panel s 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 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 Building Automation Panel applications while retaining the video graphics sophistication of higher cost platforms. Lattice LCD-Pro enables integration of multiple video sources: Video Camera and DVI Video, in the same Video Input module. LCD-Pro’s ability to manage multiple layers of display information, including video, enables all information to be presented on a single screen
LCD-Pro also enables designers to use the same platform form very low-cost to high-end Building Automation Panels.
© Lattice Semiconductor Corporation 2012
