Embien has been working on various types of embedded systems including those powered by FPGA’s for a variety of applications. Of late, there are a lot of requirements for GUI Application development on FPGAs for user interaction. In this blog, we introduce our Sparklet embedded GUI library along with our Flint FPGA UI Interface Editor for enabling FPGA for graphics. Also Sparklet running on a Linux powered Intel Cyclone V SX SoC FPGA is demonstrated with a Terasic DE1-SoC-MTL2 kit.

FPGA GUI Application Development

Modern FPGA’s have a multitude of IPs to handle different peripherals interfaces. Most of these FPGAs, called SoC FPGAs have an internal microcontroller core as a hard IP around with LEs are placed for configuration and customization.

Such a design warrants a powerful user interface for communication with the user for a seamless experience. Full fledged Intuitive GUI application development ecosystem is the need of the hour to enable a faster time to market. Developers need to dedicate their effort on FPGA and internal logic developments rather than working on nitty-gritty of FPGA GUI application development.

Sparklet – embedded GUI library is the right fit for such a FPGA based GUI development. Written purely in ANSI C, Sparklet can be ported across platform with minimal effort. The GUI Application development can be done using our Eclipse based Flint tool that supports Windows based emulation as well. The FPGA UI Interface Editor tool generates ‘C’ source files and headers that can be compiled in to the project to get a fully working application within a very short time.

Sparklet being a very modular and extensible design, it is also possible to take advantage of the Graphical acceleration engines with Sparklet to improve the rendering speed and quality.

Sparklet GUI on Intel Cyclone V FPGA

This demo of the Sparklet GUI library runs on a Intel Cyclone V SX SoC FPGA. Some of the salient features of the FPGA include

• Dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 (HPS)
• 85K programmable logic elements
• 4,450 Kbits embedded memory
• Fractional PLLs
• Hard memory controllers
• Multiple display interfaces
• Multiple USB Host interface
• Ethernet, UARTs, ADCs etc

The development kit from Terasic, DE1-SoC-MTL2 includes a DE1-SoC development board targeting Altera Cyclone® V SX SoC FPGA, along with a capacitive LCD multimedia color touch panel which natively supports five points multi-touch. The display is a 7-inch TFT LCD with pixel resolution of 800*480 and color depth of 16 million colors (8-bit RGB) along with a    LED backlight.

For such an FPGA based design, the underlying software can be designed with any of the following architectures:

• Without an OS
• With a minimal RTOS
• With full fledged OS like Linux

Sparklet, providing design flexibility, is suitable for use with each of these approaches. The below demo showcases Sparklet running on top of Linux OS.

Though none-of the underlying Graphical engine features are not used in this case, it is possible to do so using the hardware acceleration engine changes.

Thus Sparklet along with Flint makes FPGA GUI application development a lot easier and enables developers work on core functionality there by reducing overall product development time.

About Embien: Embien Technologies is a leading service provider in the Embedded software domain. Our team has rich experience in working with various OS like Linux, Android, Windows CE, FreeRTOS, uC-OS, QNX etc. Learning from our experiences in various application domains, we have conceptualized and created the Sparklet Embedded GUI tool that can be used to develop UI’s faster and smaller.