Summary
Digital displays are a fast-growing market comprising LCD, plasma, and rear projection television technologies as well as smaller displays for mobile handsets and automobiles, in addition to many other applications. Digital image processing enhances the overall viewing aesthetics of the displayed image and can differentiate your product.

Xilinx has developed a reference design IP core based on the Xilinx Spartan™-3E Display Development Board and intended for display panel applications to assist in developing products for this market. The display solution FPGA consists of a DVI Input interface, color temperature correction, precise gamma correction, an image dithering engine, and Low-Voltage Differential Signaling (LVDS) Transmit (TX) or DVI TX output interface (see Figure 1).

This document describes the Spartan-3E Display Development Board. It also provides details on the DIP switch settings and detailed resource counts for each of the IP blocks.

Table 1 defines the key IP blocks in the Spartan-3E Display Development Board.

User Switch and Push Button Settings
The switch settings in this document refer to the User Set DIP Switch block on the Spartan-3E Display Development Board (see Figure 2). [more]

Summary of Contents: This paper explores the difficulty of testing embedded software applications that operate in networked environments and distributed configurations. It then describes several innovations in software development tools – including full system simulation, application-aware and automated debugging, and application profiling – that help developers address these challenges.

Embedded systems developers face unique challenges when testing and debugging network devices and distributed applications. Even in the simplest case, building a standalone device that operates in a network environment, thorough testing involves attaching a prototype to a physical network and concocting a wide range of test scenarios to prove correct interaction with the types of systems that the device will encounter once deployed. In a small shop, it might suffice to simply plug the system into the office network. But these days, especially in larger businesses, the IT department won’t let just anything happen on the LAN. And in the early days of development, a hardware prototype may not be available. Testing large scale distributed systems is likely to require a dedicated test network and a full complement of prototype and off-the-shelf equipment, along with the software infrastructure to create and automate useful test cases. This kind of test harness comes only at great cost in time, money and complexity added to the development process. [more]

Mobile product system architects and designers face an increasingly difficult challenge. Products themselves are becoming more complex, while the schedule and budget for product development are shrinking. The key to meeting these design challenges is to build new products from a common platform that is flexible enough for customization and enhancement. The customer specific standard product (CSSP) approach that QuickLogic has pioneered provides such platforms.

Consumers are insatiable in their demands for more features and greater sophistication in their mobile products. They also require long battery lifetimes, low product costs and, above all, novelty. This leaves development teams with a demanding task: they need to create complex products that provide both the common features consumers expect as well as unique features that differentiate the product from its competitors.

These feature sets change rapidly. The mobile consumer market is evolving so quickly that the window of opportunity for a new product is often less than a year before the next product generation renders it obsolete. New product features are also evolving, and proliferating, rapidly. A new product feature that becomes popular in the market effectively forces all subsequent product designs to incorporate that feature to remain competitive. To meet the demand for novelty, design teams must get products to market quickly and often.

Regional variations in the mobile market amplify the challenge. Product design specifics often must vary by region. These variations arise from regulatory and technological differences among regions as well as from differing consumer preferences. [more]

An ARM Interview by Jan Howells, Editor IQ online

IQ So what is your definition of an “entertainment robot?”

Haga We refer to low-cost products that have features for interacting with humans as “entertainment robots.” Toy manufacturers have been developing these products based on appealing characters from cartoons and comic books. Going forward, however, Bandai plans to create its own characters and develop them into mainstay products.
Entertainment robots hold great potential as an exciting new product line, with their unique character identities.

IQ One of those is Doraemon the Robot Version 1.0 (19,800 yen plus tax) released in March 2004. First I’d like to ask you about your aims for the Real Dream Doraemon Project (RDDP), the general-purpose robot platform to be finalized in 2010, and how the project is going.

Haga The development team is pursuing two major themes in RDDP. One is the development of a general-purpose platform for making robots based on characters that appear in comics and cartoons. The other is the establishment of a foundation for making the entertainment robot itself into a character. [more]