Faster delivery

Driven by the falling costs of colour TFT displays and increased recognition of the importance of the user experience, there is a rapidly growing demand to integrate embedded functionality and intuitive graphical user interfaces into a variety of products and systems. As a result, designers of applications, ranging from industrial systems to home appliances, are under mounting pressure from marketing and product management teams to ensure that new products provide advanced functionality and deliver exceptional user experience – but without adding significant design complexity, development time or cost. With resource strapped design teams looking to focus on their own core competencies, one of the key trends in developing display based systems is the demand for platforms that can help minimise the burden of both discrete circuit design and software development, whilst mitigating commercial risks. Among the latest technological advances in this area are ‘off the shelf’ intelligent display platforms that can be integrated rapidly into new and existing designs. Just how far the concept of intelligent displays can be taken is illustrated by platforms such as Anders’ UMR range. With options for both portable and fixed applications, the UMR range offers a scalable approach, ranging from solutions that can be used as the entire display and computing core for a given product, to platforms that provide a simple way to integrate a colour TFT display and added functionality to an existing product. The UMR concept can be summarised as small sized colour TFT display options, preintegrated with a multifunctional and multiconfigurable embedded system. Effectively, the UMR range offers designers a choice of display sizes and touch screen options that are available with different levels of processor capability. These are packaged with ready to run operating systems, a variety of interfaces and support tools such as hardware and software development kits, reference designs and test solutions. The option for further design support is available in the form of the UMR interface development suite (IDS) – a graphical user interface (GUI) development environment optimised for the UMR series. This enables the creation of ‘next generation’ embedded GUIs. To illustrate the UMR concept, let us consider the UMR 5 Series. Available with a choice of 3.5in vga, 4.3in wqvga, 5.7in vga and 7in wvga displays, each UMR 5 series option is preintegrated with a configurable PXA270 based embedded processor and is supplied with a Microsoft Windows CE operating system and all required drivers.