Design and implementation of a versatile display system based on FPGA for embedded systems

A versatile display system VDS for advanced embedded systems is developed to unify and perform display operations, usually overloading the system´s main processing unit in one hand and requiring more knowledge of display technologies in the other hand. In the presented approach, the developed display system should handle the well-known display functions optimally and should highly improve interactivity sought in advanced and complex embedded systems. VDS is based on SOPC architecture, where all embedded related display functions (LEDs, 7 Segments Display, Character LCD Display and VGA Display) are built into soft IP format to enhance design flexibility. The integration of VDS in 8-bit MCU based applications resulted in almost 30% reduction in main MCUs activities, which also proved to be useful when handling information display within ZigBee networks.