Customer
The customer company is a renowned car maker, known for the production of prestigious cars which stand out for the refinement of the design and the acknowledged construction quality. It operates worldwide and is a technological benchmark for all companies that develop highly innovative solutions to stand at the top of the range.
Background
Even in the automotive world the modern communication technologies enable us to offer useful solutions to improve safety and comfort of driving, permitting at the same time a high reliability.
Question
Within the electronic interface to the passengers, it was necessary to provide an innovative device known as Instrument Panel Cluster (Dashboard) which is the instrument panel of a vehicle. The solution should disclose all relevant information with a dual LCD TFT interface.
Path
To identify a solution, we analyzed the norms and standards (especially related to the CAN and LIN bus) applicable to the product. Besides it was required to minimize the cost of the electronic solution because of the volumes in question.
Solution
The solution is based on an architecture with a single uC with only one LCD RGB controller port (RBG). From this port is possible to drive two different TFT display with a simple logic of multiplexing driving alternately pixels of the first and second display.
This technology has allowed a substantial reduction in costs. It was developed the bootloading firmware, the firmware of the display drivers and the application on a mini-kernel (real-time type).