Graham Wilson
Renesas

Business, consumer and industrial products that incorporate low-cost, moderate size TFT-LCD (thin film transistor liquid crystal display) panels are proving to be very popular. The latest TFT-LCD panels are truly dual-purpose peripherals, as they have both output and input capabilities. As output devices, the panels give product developers a flexible and dynamic way to display a large amount of information. As input devices, the panels allow the user of a product to simply touch a button or icon on the screen, or to slide the finger to make selections in an easy, natural way.

Integrating an LCD panel into a product is no trivial task, however. This paper introduces Renesas' 16-bit H8S series and 32-bit H8SX series microcontrollers, which can ease the development of low-end to mid-range systems that display complex images on QVGA and VGA TFT-LCD panels. These devices simplify designs by eliminating the need for an external LCD controller chip, while providing sufficient throughput to perform both system control tasks and execute the graphics software for generating animated display images.