Design of a small footprint embedded graphics system

In these days, smaller devices are possible to show graphics output, through attaching small-size LCD panel displays. Our target system is a small embedded system with an LCD panel. As a typical low-tier embedded system, it has a low-end CPU and restricted memories. We aimed to build-up a 2D graphics module on it. After analyzing the system requirement, we found that the hardiest restriction is the size of available memory. As an alternative to the full-scale modules, our design shows a TUI (text user interface) model, which is similar to the Unix Curses library and/or the primitive graphics system used on earlier PC user interfaces. Our design has a drawback of restricted controllability of 30×40 character resolutions on the screen, rather than 240×320 pixel resolutions, while it enables pop-up menus and screen back buffering, with less than 7K extra memory usage.