SiliconBlue Extends Human Machine Interface Applications for Mobile Market
The consumer mobile market is growing tremendously. These consumer mobile devices all need some kind of human machine interfaces (HMI) such as keypads, touch screens, track balls, switches/buttons, and scroll wheels. Designers implementing HMI functions to their application need to do so with low-power, small form factor, and low cost constraints coupled with fast time-to-market demands. SiliconBlue’s iCE65™ mobileFPGA™ devices offers ultra-low power, low cost, and small form factor packages along with already proven HMI solutions that help accelerate the design process.
SiliconBlue’s iCE65 mobileFPGAs can serve as a companion chip to an applications processor implement different HMI functions such as touch screen control or a keypad interface. (See Figure 1).
Figure 1 - SiliconBlue’s iCE65 mobileFPGA devices can implement multiple human machine interface functions such as a touch screen interface or keypad scanning.
Keypad Scanning
Keypad scanning is one of the most common HMI functions found in high-end smartphones. However, extending keypad scanning to an applications processor is challenging for many smartphone applications because it requires many I/O pins that are limited on an application processor. Using an iCE65 mobileFPGA device alongside an applications processor, designers can implement row and column matrix keypad scanning without sacrificing a large number of I/O.
Figure 2 - iCE65 mobileFPGA device used for matrix keypad scanning.
Touchscreen Control
Nowadays, touch screen is almost a must have in mobile phones. SiliconBlue’s touch screen controller is ideal for mobile applications. It is simple, low cost, and easy to adapt to different applications. SiliconBlue’s design example makes use of a digitizer chip to convert the analog signal levels from the touch panel to digital. It features a Successive Approximation Register (SAR) ADC and has built-in switches to switch touch screen electrodes between being driven and being assigned to input to the ADC.
Figure 3 - iCE65 mobileFPGA device used as a touchscreen controller.
About the iCE65 Family
iCE65 ultra low-power mobileFPGAs are the premier programmable logic solution for consumer, battery-based applications such as smart phones, eBooks/ePaper, netbooks, digital picture frames, mobile internet devices, portable media players, hand-held POS, medical instruments, digital still cameras and flash camcorders. These applications have an extremely short development and product life cycle; therefore, by combining the reprogramming flexibility benefit of FPGAs with the low cost, low power and single-chip benefits of ASICs, iCE65 FPGAs offer the “best of both worlds” solution for handheld consumer system designers.
For more iCE65 mobileFPGA product information please contact sales@edom.com.tw
