Designing a high-definition FPGA-based graphics controller

Dominik Domanski, MYLIUM
EETimes (10/4/2011 12:24 PM EDT)

Recently, one of our clients came to us looking for a solution to display graphics on LCD monitors. We were informed that any data was to be is generated by a separate device and fed to the graphics controller using an external microcontroller. Our client already had the rest of the system made and working, so switching to some Android/PC based system wasn't an option. Also, the ability to add custom-made features was a big pro for an FPGA-based solution.

At first this sounded like a job for our LAVA 10 SVGA Controller, but then some additional requirements started to appear:

The device needs to be able to display graphics in different resolutions starting from 1024x768 to 1920x1080
It needs to have separate layers that can be switched on and off and can be merged together to create more complex picture.
The layers need to have some transparency features
A hardware cursor would be nice :-)

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