Human-machine interface modelling tools from Toshiba

A Capricorn demonstration utilising the tools will be shown on the Toshiba booth at the FISITA World Automotive Congress in Munich 14-19 September 2008.

Capricorn is a family of RISC-based system-on-chip (SoC) processors for automotive displays that offers an extremely high level of system integration. Capricorn graphic processors provide solutions for driving and managing colour TFT displays increasingly found in instrument clusters in medium- to high-end vehicles.

The Altia toolchain enables users to prototype new concepts, simulate integrated models and then generate deployable Capricorn code far quicker than would be possible if programming and debugging manually. It comprises three parts: PhotoProto, Altia Design and DeepScreen.

PhotoProto automatically transforms Photoshop graphics into a working, interactive, user-driven prototype. Once the user has arranged and named the graphics layers for buttons, screens and other user interface objects, PhotoProto will generate a working prototype.

Altia Design is a fully-featured user interface design, simulation and model integration environment. It allows user interface models to be built from scratch or, alternatively, existing graphic assets can be imported. Altia Design then helps designers integrate the model with third party tools or their own application code. This results in a functionally complete, accurate simulation model that can be used to test code, algorithms, concepts and systems.

DeepScreen is a graphics code generator that transforms a model or prototype into deployable code. It generates code that is small, efficient and tuned for Capricorn processors. DeepScreen also takes care of much of the graphics programming work, allowing programmers to focus on the application code and significantly reducing product time to market.