Simultaneous LCD and video output for handheld devices delivered by QuickLogic and Chrontel

This is an example of QuickLogic's low power Customer Specific Standard Product (CSSP) solutions providing fast time-to-market and design flexibility for handheld applications, said Owen Bateman of QuickLogic. This new simultaneous display solution enables developers to implement a wide range of exciting handheld capabilities, such as plugging a PDA into a conference room television to give a presentation, playing a mobile-phone video game on a TV, or even watching a movie stored on a portable media player on any TV.

Working in conjunction with Chrontel, QuickLogic addressed three major challenges associated with the simultaneous display of images on both LCD screens and external video devices such as televisions and VGA projectors, which have different, scan directions.

The first challenge was providing the memory control to manage frame buffers using an X-Y pixel swap that provides correct simultaneous image display on both the portrait-mounted LCD panels common to handheld devices and the landscape-oriented displays of television and video projectors.

The second challenge was to accommodate frame- and pixel-rate differences between LCD and various television standards, including PAL and NTSC.

The third was to provide this functionality without making excessive demands on system battery power and without requiring host processor intervention beyond set-up and configuration.

QuickLogic's CSSP solution leverages the company's ultra-low power consumption programmable fabric to implement the memory interfaces, RGB interfaces, X-Y swap conversion logic, and active power management needed to address these challenges, all in a single device. When coupled with Chrontel's CH7013 TV encoder and a mobile SDRAM frame buffer, the total design handles all rate conversions and voltage level shifting needed to get input data from the LCD display controller on the application processor and drive the TV encoder device.

By partnering with QuickLogic, adds David Tsai of Chrontel, we have successfully developed an approach that enables portrait-oriented images and video from mobile handsets, PDAs and PMPs to display correctly on conventional PAL and NTSC displays. QuickLogic's CSSP handles all the timing related to the various display rates and scan direction conversion while the CH7013 processes and tunes the video stream to produce excellent TV-out quality.

As with all of its CSSP designs, QuickLogic can adapt its X-Y swap system block to meet a customer's specific needs, speeding time-to-market for developers having unique requirements.