TES Electronic Solutions and Renesas Electronics Europe Announce the Availability of GUIliani

The GUIliani Software Development Kit (SDK) provides a C++ framework as well as a set of PC based tools for convenient generation of Graphical User Interfaces, including rapid prototyping. It also facilitates the implementation of advanced user interfaces with great efficiency and special effects for the best user experience on embedded platforms. GUIliani on the SH7723 platform is accelerated by the TES eGML software renderer. This provides features such as alpha blending, sub-pixel accurate rendering, triangle and polygon support, various blits features and high-quality anti aliasing with a very small memory footprint. The accompanying GUIliani HMI editor, a WYSIWYG tool, provides a number of predefined widgets such as buttons, scrollbars, text boxes, lists, animations and various controls. As a result, system designers can easily add custom controls, widgets and animations to the HMI editor and application using the stream runtime code templates and XML. GUIliani applications are built on the concept of the MVC (Model View Controller) design pattern, with views supported by XML files. These can be interchanged to define a different look and feel on various products while retaining the underlying logic.

Renesas Electronics’ SH7723 incorporates the SH-4A CPU core and achieves a processing performance of 720 Dhrystone MIPS (DMIPS) at the maximum operating frequency of 400 MHz, for an excellent unit-frequency performance of 1.8 DMIPS/MHz. In addition, the 64 Kbytes primary cache memory is supplemented by a new 256 Kbytes secondary cache memory, enabling faster execution of software. An additional feature incorporated in the SH7723 is the VPU5F IP core for high-performance video processing supporting MPEG-4, H.264 and VC-1 video compression standards.

Martin Gassner, Director Marketing & Sales, TES, stated: We are happy to extend our long co-operation in graphics with Renesas Electronics. This ranges from IP licensing in the automotive sector to supporting SH processors and providing a state of the art embedded user interface solution. Customers of Renesas Electronics will greatly benefit from using the GUIliani framework and tools to achieve their critical time-to-market goals and deliver the best user experience in segments such as automotive, medical technology, home automation, and industrial HMI. We are excited to be working with Renesas Electronics and hope to continue this co-operation in extending GUIliani to support other product families.”

Robert Kalman, Marketing Manager, Renesas Electronics Europe, stated: Our SH7723 processor follows the highly successful SH7722 and with even greater integration Renesas Electronics targets a much broader market space and applications. Our collaboration with TES to supply GUIliani, a market proven user interface solution together with the SH7723 processor family, means we can provide our customers with an easy and rapid way to develop and deploy ground-breaking, media-rich graphical user interfaces.

GUIliani Availability

A demo of rapid user interface prototyping with GUIliani on emtrion's HiCO SH7723 board can be seen at any of the Visualization days. Developers interested in trying a demo version can obtain the package from http://support.tesbv.com.

Typical Applications

· Home automation and smart energy devices

· Industrial and medical HMI applications and devices

· Car navigation systems and personal navigation devices (PNDs)

· Portable media players and V2IP (video and voice over IP) terminals