Altia’s GUI development software has been available in a variant targeting the Freescale Vybrid graphics controller since before the target was publicly available; Altia says it has recently seen an increase in interest from developers working on medical products.
Altia CEO, Mike Juran, comments, “Vybrid has always been a strong part for us. Over the past months, it seems that medical device developers have caught on to its unique capabilities.... [the] platform strikes the right balance between power and value – and Altia’s software tools allow GUI developers to wring every last bit of performance from the hardware.”
The Freescale Vybrid target, Altia continues, offers low power consumption, and uses less memory while offering better graphics due to its plentiful hardware layers. With the use of the Altia Layer Manager, development teams are able to take full advantage of the Vybrid’s layered architecture.
The Altia Layer Manager allows users to maximise Vybrid’s sixty-four hardware layers by graphically creating virtually unlimited layer combinations that are implemented on-the-fly. With Altia’s code generation solution for Freescale Vybrid, animations such as moving objects and dynamic opacity can be executed with no CPU – just using the capabilities of the layers. Additionally, the capability to define colour format offers significant advantage to GUI quality and memory requirements. Developers are able to set different colour formats on each layer – drastically reducing ROM requirements and improving image appearance.
Altia claims that one North American medical device manufacturer, nearing production with Altia code running on Vybrid, has seen more than 50% reduction in overall expected ROM size for its production GUI code. This company also expects to easily pass FDA approval because – from day one – it has had all of the C source code for the user interface available for inspection, testing and documentation.
Many users, the company adds, are exploring Vybrid as they move to new programs; Altia has also offered support for Freescale platforms such as MPC5605s (Spectrum), MPC5645S (Rainbow) and the i.MX family. With Altia Design, the GUI editor and centerpiece of Altia's tool chain, users create custom graphics from scratch or use assets from tools like Adobe Photoshop to draw their GUIs, create animation, define behaviour and optimise user experience. Once complete, Altia DeepScreen generates pure C source code for the Altia design model that can be deployed onto a wide array of low- to high-power processors from silicon providers including Freescale, STMicroelectronics, Renesas, NXP, Spansion, Texas Instruments and others.
About Freescale Vybrid Controllers
“The Vybrid family of controllers offers a unique, low-power system solution that gives customers the capability to combine rich applications requiring crisp, cool GUIs and connectivity with real-time responsiveness. Customers can create systems that concurrently run a high-level operating system like Linux and a real-time operating system such as MQX on the same device.
“The products in the Vybrid family of controllers have capabilities ranging from entry-level, single core Cortex-A class SoCs to dual heterogeneous core SoCs with multiple communication and connectivity options.
“Vybrid devices are ideal for a variety of industrial and consumer applications along with automotive driver information systems. For more information about the Freescale Vybrid family of products, visit the product webpage.
“Features of the DeepScreen Target
The Freescale Vybrid DeepScreen target is equipped with these key features:
Hardware accelerated graphics – DCU, DCU-Lite and OpenVG.
Runtime image clipping to reduce the amount of updating to the display and to increase the overall system performance.
Layer capabilities for taking maximum advantage of hardware features.
Choose your layer formats – ARGB8888, ARGB4444, PAL1, PAL2, ALPHA8, RGB565 and many more!
Great looking fonts with anti-aliasing.
Dirty region redrawing for lightning fast screen updates.
Support for vectors and images – as well as animation, stimulus and control code.”
