Renesas Technology Europe has extended its QVGA single-chip liquid crystal display (LCD) controller/driver line-up with the R61504, which has a 16.77 million colour display capability and supports the Mobile Display Digital Interface (MDDI) high-speed serial interface standard. Support for the MDDI small-amplitude-differential high-speed serial interface standard allows direct connection to an MDDI compatible baseband LSI, eliminating the need for a previously necessary bridge chip. The MDDI standard also offers a major reduction in the number of signal lines compared with the conventional parallel transfer method and enables low EMI noise to be achieved.
The R61504 also features conventional parallel, serial and RGB interfaces. Connection to a baseband LSI and microcontroller is possible by means of an 8/16-bit high-speed bus interface and highly efficient transfer can be performed by a high-speed burst RAM write function. In addition, RGB, Vsync and FMARK interfaces are incorporated as image data interfaces, facilitating support for moving images featuring smooth motion display. The controller/driver incorporates an RGB individual gamma adjustment function that allows more precise red, blue and green gamma settings. This improves image colour reproduction and display quality by adjusting settings according to variations in image quality due to LCD panel colour characteristics or external lighting conditions. An endian-free function is also included.
The chip features nine general-purpose port pins that can be used in various ways, including receiving backlight, incoming call LED, vibrator and similar control signals by the MDDI or another interface from a baseband LSI, and outputting those control signals from these ports. This enables the number of signal lines to be reduced. When the MDDI is used, it is also possible to transfer instructions and image data to a sub LCD panel module via these general-purpose ports. A hardware power supply sequencer is incorporated that controls the LCD drive power supply start-up sequence. There are a number of power supplies and the powering-on sequence of these has previously been set entirely by the user.
The same 8-colour display mode, standby mode and deep standby mode as in previous models are provided as functions for reducing power consumption. Use of these modes makes it possible to achieve low current dissipation equivalent to that of a colour STN liquid crystal panel, helping to extend the battery life of mobile phones and similar devices. Chip short sides have been kept down to 2 mm or less in size, contributing to the implementation of narrow-framed LCD panels for mobile phone use. COG (Chip On Glass) is supported as the mounting method. Sample shipments will begin in August 2005.
