The next generation of ultra-low power pico 2D GPUs has arrived!
Innovation and architectural brilliance bring performance graphics rendering to the smallest and most power conscious embedded display devices. Minimal silicon area of only 0.11mm2 (@28nm), lowest MCU utilization of less than 5% and GPU power consumption of under 1mw, makes NEMA® | pico XS truly an agile GPU superstar.
Additional information
Download NEMA® | pico XS Product BriefA fast 2D GUI interface and the NEMA® | pico XS is the perfect candidate to support entry level IoT-platforms, wearable and embedded devices with low cost and ultra-low power requirements supporting SoCs with a 32/64-bit MCU (e.g. ARM® | Cortex® | M processors) and provide fluid 2D graphics experience for a wide range of applications.
Developers are able to create compelling 2D Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and software applications with ultra-long battery life at a significantly lower cost for power-memory-area constrained IoT devices.
HARDWARE ACCELERATED GRAPHICS IS THE KEY TO SUCCESSFUL END USER DISPLAY PRODUCTS
Hardware GPU rendering is the key element to accelerate GUI composition at 60+ fps in small form factors. Fast 2D GUI execution and the ability to display clean, precise content, for intuitive human-machine interaction, are key factors in creating exciting display devices that end users will enjoy using.
NO FRILLS - NO BURDEN - NO COMPROMISE
NEMA® | pico XS is designed for devices where CPU, on-chip memory, battery, and bandwidth are very limited and is optimized to work with MCUs (ARM® M class, ARC® EM5D, RISC-V) on a bare metal / RTOS, with clock frequencies as low as 10 MHz (not limited). The tiny graphics library is as small as 30k Bytes fitting into the smallest on-chip DDR or Flash memory. The software driver stack, SDK, and toolkit “NEMA® | gfx” provide an easy-to-use programming environment with aggressive power savings, intelligent composition, rendering, and bandwidth modifications to build an appealing ultra-low power graphical user experience.
ARCHITECTURE
A fast 2D GUI interface and the NEMA® | pico XS has been designed for graphics efficiency in ultra-compact silicon area and it is the smallest member of the NEMA® | pico family. Its fixed point data path and instruction set architecture (ISA) are tailored to GUIs acceleration and small display applications leading to substantial improvements in power consumption and silicon area.
NEMA® | pico XS microarchitecture is based on a lean version of NEMA® ISA and it combines hardware-level support for multi-threading, VLIW and low-level vector processing in the most power efficient way.
INTEGRATION / VERIFICATION
The NEMA® | pico XS GPU IP Platform is available in Verilog and is easy to integrate and verify. NEMA® | pico XS ASIC reference designs have been verified in various process technologies.
NEMA® | pico XS is designed with AMBA® interfaces.
The core has been verified through extensive simulation and rigorous code coverage measurements. It comes together with a complete verification suite that ensures correct migration to target technology nodes.
The NEMA® | GFX library, which is available in pure ANSI C with no dependencies, allows easy portability to systems running with or without an RTOS.
The Software Development Kit includes:
- NEMA® | GUI-Builder (non-commercial version), a graphical cross-platform software framework enabling rapid high-end Graphics User Interface (GUI) development on low resource hardware.
- NEMA® | PIX-Presso (non-commercial version), a utility software for converting images to/from formats suitable for low power embedded devices.
- NEMA® | Bits, an EVK for technology evaluation and pre-silicon application development.
HARDWARE COMPONENTS
- Programmable Shader engine with a VLIW instruction set
- Command list based DMAs to minimize CPU overhead
- Primitives Rasterizer
- Texture Mapping Unit
- Display Controller (optional)
IMAGE TRANSFORMATION
- Texture mapping
- Point sampling
- Bilinear filtering
- Blit support
- Rotation any angle
- Mirroring
- Stretch (independently on x and y axis)
- Source and/or destination color keying
- Format conversions on the fly
BLENDING SUPPORT
- Fully Programmable Alpha blending modes (source and destination)
- Source/Destination color keying
DRAWING PRIMITIVES
- Pixel / Line drawing
- Filled rectangles
- Triangles (Gouraud Shaded)
- Quadrilateral
TEXT RENDERING SUPPORTS
- Bitmap antialiased (A1 / A2 / A4 / A8 )
- Font Kerning
- Unicode (UTF8)
COLOR FORMATS
- 32-bit RGBA8888 / BGRA8888 / ABGR8888
- 24-bit RGB
- 16-bit RGBA5551 / RGB565
- 8-bit Α8 / L8 / RGB332
- 4-bit A4 / L4
- 2-bit A2 / L2
- 1-bit A1 / L1
- TSCTM** (Optional) (Read Only)
- YUV Read Only