Microsemi releases SmartFusion cSoC reference design

     Microsemi Corporation announced the availability of reference designs for LCD displays based on SmartFusion customizable system-on-chip (cSoC) for industrial and medical applications. The flexible cSoC architecture enables product developers to support a wide variety of LCD panel configuration options, as well as the ability to cost-effectively change LCD driver functions remotely to support product upgrades. In addition, the new platform supports Open Graphic Library Safety Critical (OpenGL SC), the industry standard for developing safety-critical embedded display systems.

     Mgi's award-winning SmartFusion cSoC integrates an FPGA architecture, a hardcore ARM Cortex-M3 processor and programmable simulation resources. OpenGL SC application programming interface (API) runs on ARM processors integrated with SmartFusion. This makes it easy for developers to create graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for standard or custom LCD displays.

     The LCD display reference design is architecturally divided to implement the computationally intensive portion of the customizable display controller within SmartFusion's pop-up FPGA architecture. This architecture allows product engineers to leverage the processing power of the ARM Cortex-M3 to handle critical system layer control task management and algorithmic execution tasks, including support for human machine interface (HMI) functions and a variety of communication protocols commonly required for industrial and medical applications.