Solutions
Automotive
Intelligence inside the cars is increasing in significant speed and IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) systems has become a single most important competitive differentiation area in automotive industry. This has led to a rapid expansion to use LCD displays that are used to play IVI graphical user interface for cars. Car entertainment system (including GPS navigation systems and car audio systems) is becoming more widely adopted as on-board information display centers with expanding array of functions. There is also a need to display a wide variety of alerts aimed for driving safety improvements, as well as video images from multiple on-board cameras. All of these create a significant demand for solutions that involve graphical user interfaces powered by innovative graphics IP cores.
Application examples
Fixed GPS navigation systems, portable navigation devices (PND), multifunction dashboards, car audio, car infotainment
The advantages of the DMP IP core
Industry standard specifications
The DMP IP core supports various industry standard graphical API specifications that have been established by the Khronos Group. It also complies with industry-standard SoC bus specifications such as OCP and AMBA.
MAESTRO-2G
MAESTRO technology is a 3D graphics extension function that DMP has developed independently, which uses hardware to implement various shader functions. This allows PC/console-grade high quality graphical representations to use in various car electronics products in smoothly manner.
Super low power consumption
DMP uses optimized graphics pipelines and dynamic clock gating to provide low power solutions that are suitable for portable devices where there is a need for long battery life.
Smaller cores
SoCs for portable devices impose strict cost requirements. (SoC stands for“System on Chip.”) The DMP IP core provides the smallest gate size of its class available in the embedded industry, which contributes to the development of lower cost SoCs.
Top class graphical processing performance
The DMP IP core does not just have excellent graphical processing performance, but it boosts the industry’s highest level of processing performance per unit area of silicon. This delivers efficient graphical rendering at lower silicon cost.
Scalable architecture
The degree of parallelism for the graphics processing pipelines within the DMP IP core can be changed in a scalable manner. This allows the DMP IP core to flexibly support the performance requirements for a wide range of graphics systems, from low-end to high-end graphics systems.
Customization
There are various specifications required for graphics for portable devices. The DMP IP core can be customized flexibly in accordance with your demands, in terms of both software and hardware. IP core customization is supported by DMP’s industry-leading development and testing environment.
DMP IP core products
Fixed GPS navigation systems
PICA®200 is a graphical processing unit that features MAESTRO technology and SMAPH®-S, which supports programmable shaders. Embedding PICA200 in fixed GPS car navigation functions makes it possible to depict extremely realistic 3D maps that look solid and allows driver to easily focus on driving with the help of realistic and smoothly rendered 3D maps. Realistic 3D representations uses various textures of material surfaces and requires advanced rendering processing, such as bump mapping and pixel shading, whereby shadow calculations are performed pixel by pixel. DMP’s leading-edge shader rendering technology delivers such processing at high speed and super low power consumption and therefore opens up new user experiences for 3D map depiction in GPS car navigation systems.
Portable navigation devices (PND)
SMAPH-F is a 2D vector graphics IP core that is compact and super energy efficient, while still boasting the best performance for its class available in the industry. By including SMAPH-F in portable navigation devices (PNDs), user interfaces with extremely high quality 2D graphics can be displayed and solution meets the demand for lower costs too. For example, SMAPH-F can be used to create menu screens that are well designed and easier to understand, or to render text in multiple languages with numerous fonts and arbitrary sizes with high-speed rendering of scalable fonts. Maps in 2D vector data format can be processed at high speed, including the processing for zooming in and out, and scrolling and rotating maps. This allows highly reliable 2D vector maps to be rendered in real time.
Multifunction dashboards
In recent years there has been an increasing tendency to use LCD displays for car dashboards. This has increased a need to display various alert information for safer driving, as well as video data from external view monitors, in addition to traditional instrument panels such as speedometers and odometers. There has also been a demand to display this information in a way that is easy to understand, with sophisticated design sense. PICA200 Lite is a 3D graphics IP core that can be used as a graphics display accelerator for dashboards in order to display instrument panels as realistic 3D objects, or to use three dimensional depth to efficiently design the layout of various information. PICA200 Lite provides optimal solutions for obtaining maximal 3D graphics performance despite strict cost restrictions.