Abstract: This paper briefly introduces the development trend of automotive instrument display and analyzes the functions of Toshiba TMPR46X (Capricorn-Bt).
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introduction
In recent years, more and more semiconductor manufacturers have paid attention to automobiles as an important application, and as Apple and Google join the automotive ecosystem, the future of automotive electronics applications will explode. Vehicle-mounted instrument display is a very important application for automotive electronics, and it is also a concern for many car manufacturers to create differentiation.
1 Development direction of vehicle display control IC
Many semiconductor manufacturers have introduced automotive display control ICs, trying to create more features to bring a better user experience to drivers and passengers. Toshiba has been introducing control ICs for automotive instrument displays since 2002, from the first generation of TX3916AF, TX4961XBG (Capricorn-M) to TMPR460/461/462/463XBG (Capricorn-Bt), and is now under development. The TZ series, the display dimension also began to transition from 2D to 3D. Toshiba's automotive display controllers are designed to provide display dashboard applications that integrate CPU, graphics engine, and various interfaces on a single chip, and Toshiba has developed a stepper motor controller (controllable) Analog display) car display controller.
2 Advantages of TMPR46X (Capricorn-Bt)
The Capricorn-Bt series is Toshiba's current proven solution, which can reduce the increasing cost pressure of the car factory and meet the needs of future new energy vehicles. This series of products uses ARM Cortex-R4 core, frequency up to 300MHz, with timing and storage data protection, built-in high-performance secure code decoding function, 3 CAN interface, 2 UART interface, 2 SPI interface, support 5 channels Stepper motor control, 2 independent image output controllers, fully automatic clock calibration, 2D image accelerator (can achieve 2.5D effect). The TMPR461 (Capricorn-Bt1) has an external Flash, and the TMPR462/3/4 (Capricorn-Bt2/3/4) has a built-in 4M, 8M, and 16M Flash.
2.1 screen resolution
The screen resolution of the full virtual instrument on the market is generally 1280×480 or 1440×560, while the screen resolution of the TMPR46X (Capricorn-Bt) series can reach 4095×2047. Due to its high resolution, the virtual table Can support and cover. And in terms of cost, it is relatively low. That is to say, if there are different size screen requirements, the customer does not need to make any changes on the IC, just need to change the corresponding screen, the supported screen size can be from 5 inches to 12.3 inches, or even 15 inches. This is equivalent to designing a lot of products on a common platform, which can greatly reduce the development cost and save development time.
2.2 Image Engine
The Capricorn-Bt series also supports built-in and external SDRAM and LPDDR, Flash. The image engine includes a texture engine, a drawing engine, a rotation engine, and a deformation engine. Among them, the mapping engine and the drawing engine are more common in the market, and these engines are all in the same industry. But in terms of the drawing engine, Capricorn-Bt has a unique highlight, Toshiba has made it accurate to 1/16 of the pixels, while other manufacturers use one pixel as the smallest unit. This uses Capricorn-Bt to make the image display more delicate and greatly reduce the jaggedness.
2.3 Virtual Instrument
Now the meter shows that more and more virtual instruments will be used. When designing the virtual instrument, the rotation of the pointer will be involved. Capricorn-Bt has anti-aliasing function, so the pointer will move smoothly and the lowest rotation angle. It is 0.1 degree and has a high-precision filtering function. And more importantly, the programmer's requirements are relatively low. The programmer only needs to give a background and a foreground image that needs to be rotated, and then specify the rotation angle of the rotation engine and the X and Y positions of the texture through a program written by himself. The Capricorn-Bt's rotation engine automatically performs the rotation.
2.4 deformation engine
Another important application is the deformation engine, which corrects the rear view mirror and the front view mirror. The general rearview mirrors are all fisheye lenses. After imaging, it is a distorted image. If you want it to be flat, you need to use the deformation engine function. The image is transformed into a flat image or a flat image into a distorted image by the TMPR46X's morphing engine. It is characterized by real-time deformation, no MCU operation, and hardware. . This can reduce the development difficulty.
The Capricorn-Bt morphing engine (Figure 2) is very flexible and can be arbitrarily deformed, all done by hardware, and has color correction functions such as brightness, chromaticity, contrast, and channel for the entire color. Replace it.
2.5 Video Smart Capture
Regarding the video smart capture function, the image input by the camera is in digital format. The Capricorn-Bt features a resolution of 2048×1024 for the highest supported image and 1024×512 for the stored RAM. For video capture, you can capture a portion of the captured image directly and then zoom in or out. This process does not require software to participate, but is also done by hardware.
2.6 Multi-stream simultaneous decoding
Capricorn-Bt also supports multi-stream simultaneous decoding, supporting two decoders, one of which is called PNG decoder. PNG decoding is very advantageous for compressed images. When a WVGA image is not compressed, it may reach 1.5M. If it is compressed by PNG. In the future, you can compress 80% of the capacity. This saves space in RAM and FLASH, which in turn reduces costs. The other is called RLE compression mode. RLE is lossless compression, which can achieve a large compression ratio, and is also very advantageous for saving FLASH cost.
2.7 Distortion coordination
Now, in order to save development costs and speed up time to market, many products will create a development platform, and platform development means that all products of engineers are designed with the highest standards. However, if the engineer wants to do some low-end products, it may need to use 666 screen or 565 screen. At this time, due to the lack of low image, it will cause distortion (the picture on the left of Figure 3), Toshiba's vehicle instrument control platform The dither plug-in can perform distortion coordination (pictured on the right side of Figure 3), ensuring that the products developed on the platform will have excellent display performance in the high-end and low-end areas.
3 market
At present, Toshiba Semiconductor's Capricorn-Bt series of vehicle instrument control chips have sold more than 10 million pieces worldwide, 40% of which are from the European market, including BMW 5, 6, and 7 series products.
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