Research And Implementation Of Configurable Display Controller IP Core Based On SOPC System

Abstract:With the development of electronic technology and improvement of people’s living standards, LCD display has gradually become the mainsteam way of visualization, and has been more widely used in daily life and production. In the LCD display system, the display controller is one of the core components. In order to reduce the cost and satisfy the demands of different LCD specifications and different display application requirements, the structure of display controller must be designed to be more flexible and the function must be more configurable to increase the reusability. This paper proposed a feature rich and architecture-flexible configurable display controller IP core based on SOPC system, and complete the RTL design and simulation in Verilog HDL by using the top-down design method. The main research contents and work include:1. Design of sepecification function of the configurable display controller. This paper analysised the requirements for the display controller in different graphical display applications, completed the specification design, and further achieve the reconfigurable features on display resolution, size and position of the display window, input data format, data format conversion, Alpha blending, Dithering and Gamma correction.2. Design of the configurable display controller hardware. This paper proposed a hardware architecture for the configurable display controller, Meanwhile, Based on the hardware architecture and process flow, the configurable display controller is divided to several modules. By designing the master/slave interface for Avalon bus, implemented the independent high-speed data transmission for display commands and image data. Completed the design of the timing generation module to provide the synchronization and enable signals for the applications of different display resolutions and different display windows; designed the data processing module with configurable data format and configurable image processing functions to provide flexible support for different complex graphics applications. 3. Encapsulation of the display controller IP core and design of device driver. The encapsulation of display controller was completed by the custom component encapsulation tool in the SOPC Builder. Meanwhile, the driver for display controller IP core was designed by using the Nios Ⅱ IDE. All these can improve reusability of the configurable display controller IP core.We did the function simulations for each module in ModelSim. Meanwhile, a display verification system was constructed in the SOPC Builder. Finally, verified the whole design function on FPGA development board DE4-530combined with Altera Stratix IV EP4SGX53040C2device. The experiment results show that this display controller can achieve an expected displaying effect.