Genode FPGA Graphics / News: Recent posts

Among the various software improvements of Genode FX, there is a new demonstration project showing off its unique features.

In contrast to the previous releases, which improved the hardware side of Genode FX, the release 9.3 brings the first major software update. We enhanced the software stack to support the rendering of antialiased fonts, made effects such as drop shadows and translucent windows configurable at runtime, and restructured the graphics backend to ease the future support of different pixel formats. The highlight of this release, however, is a completely new demonstration project featuring a terminal window to directly interact with the GUI via its command interface, a new settings window, a slide show, and a grid widget demo.

Thanks to the kind support of Trenz Electronic (http://www.trenz-electronic.de), Genode Labs---the company behind Genode FX---will present the Genode FPGA Graphics project as co-exhibitor at the Embedded World 2009 exhibition. If you like to see Genode FX in action and meet its developers in person, we invite you to visit us:

Embedded World 2009, March 03-05, 2009, hall 12, booth 12-536.

As we are constantly extending the range of platforms supported by Genode FX, we have now documented the process of adapting our FPGA graphics solution to new platforms by the example of the Virtex-4-based ML405 board.

Our detailed porting guide (https://sourceforge.net/docman/display_doc.php?docid=132123&group_id=237260) will enable third parties to deploy our technology on custom FPGA boards in a straight-forward way. The guide takes the popular ML405 evaluation platform as example but the described methodology should be easily applicable to other boards as well. In addition to the ML405, we have added new example projects for the Spartan-3E and Spartan-3AN platforms to our public subversion repository. With the current release 2008-10 (https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=237260), we support the Spartan-3A/3AN/3E, the Virtex-4-based ML405, and the Virtex-5-based ML507 platforms.

With the release 2008-09, Genode FX supports the PowerPC 440 as available in certain Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGAs. A demo for the ML507 board is available. On this board, Genode FX runs on the PowerPC clocked at 300 MHz and uses the DVI connector for video output. The resolution is 1024x768.

Genode FX is a composition of hardware and software that enables the creation of fully fledged graphical user interfaces as system-on-chip solutions using commodity FPGAs, e.g., Xilinx' low-cost Spartan3 series. The integrated solution complements the Microblaze soft core with custom hardware for interconnecting display and input devices. On the software side, the heart of the project is a complete GUI software stack especially tailored to resource-constrained embedded systems. In addition to leveraging the Microblaze architecture, support for the PowerPC core as featured in high-end Virtex5 FPGAs is on the way. This prospect makes Genode FX a solution that scales with the demands of current and future applications. The release features a complete demonstration project ready to use for Spartan3A Starter Kit boards.