Design and Implementation of a Table-based GUI for MP3 Players

In addition to the two present methods for system control programming mechanism of MP3 players, due to the marketing competition of MP3 players, there is a need for a fast GUI design for various customers. The first method stores only the boot code in the ROM of the controller. The main program is stored in the NAND flash which includes the initializing program code. As long as the initialization is completed, the program code will be loaded into the system from the NAND flash. The advantages of this method are that the main program can update the GUI anytime and provide more flexibility. However, the chip area will increase due to the need of RAM for storing the program. The second method is to store the main program into the ROM of the controller, by which this design does not need to use an extra RAM in order to save the chip area. However, when the main program is once stored into the ROM, the function of the MP3 player can not change any more. In this paper, we propose a table based GUI design which provides a fast way to obtain the different programmable GUI from the prestored NAND flash. A couple of tables are used to support various customer GUIs, such as, a command table for the basic operational procedure, a display table for the basic display components, a manual table for the basic function of the MP3 player and a key table for the key function used with the MP3 operation. These tables can be prestored in the NAND flash module. When users turn on the MP3 player, the main program of the MP3 player will load in the customer required tables. Hence, by using our design, a different set of these tables will provide users with different GUIs even if the same chip set in the hardware modules is utilized