The company's BT817 and BT818 represent its fourth generation of EVE products, and follow the established mantra of being designed to help engineers with little or no relevant prior experience in building advanced HMIs with high degrees of differentiation.
These graphic controller ICs are intended for use in retail, digital signage and office management systems, as well as public information units, vending machines, domestic appliances, store/mall direction finding systems, training/educational equipment and interactive exhibits. They are able to address the requirements of HMIs rendered on much larger format displays and offer greater resolution levels too.
Suitable for use with 1Mpixel displays, the BT817 and BT818 support numerous resolution options - such as 1920x480, 1440x540, 1280x800, 1024x600, 800x600, 800x480, 480x272, etc. Each has a 1Mbyte embedded graphics RAM, although this can be supplemented by attaching an external NOR flash memory through the QSPI interface. Thanks to the object-oriented approach pioneered by EVE, there is no need for a frame buffer to be incorporated into the HMI system.
In addition, by leveraging adaptive scalable texture compression (ASTC), it is possible to lower the system’s graphics processing overhead, which means that better use can be made of the available data storage capacity, so that bigger items can be accessed and more compelling HMI content delivered.
The BT818 is optimised for use with 4-wire resistive touchscreens, while the BT817 has been designed to accompany capacitive touchscreens (with multi-touch functionality allowing detection of up to 5 different touch points). Touch point movement can be accurately tracked and there is the scope to assign 255 different touch tags. The ability to adjust both the horizontal and vertical sync timing means that a much wider array of different display units can be accommodated. Power mode control ensures that electricity consumption is reigned in. Other notable features include video playback, enhanced sketch processing and a built-in sound synthesizer.
“EVE, and the unique object-based architecture that it relies upon, has already made a huge impact on the way that HMIs are now constructed, with the display, touch and audio aspects all being addressed via a single chip. It has streamlined the whole process and reduced the bill-of-materials costs involved significantly,” said Bridgetek’s founder and CEO Fred Dart. “Through the latest additions to this product family, we can assist our OEM partners in bringing touch interaction to a plethora of new applications where larger format displays are employed.”
