Design for embedded chinese display smart card

The storage and display of Chinese character data and the battery life are two bottle-necks of a Chinese display smart card which is one kind of super smart cards. This paper presented a new idea to realize the Chinese display which was a practice of embedded font solution. A die-form regular MCU, a smart card MCU and a graphical LCD controller (LCD driver) provided the main functions of the system to show Chinese characters on a graphical LCD panel, to receive operations from users and to run monitor program or, moreover, COS (card operating system). 2-wire serial interface (TWI) was selected to be the communication protocol between the main MCU and the LCD controller in order to reduce the connection numbers and to enhance reliability. To minimize power consumption is one main design target for extending battery life. Besides selecting components with low power consumption, a power control scheme was designed to meet this requirement. A functional demonstrator was assembled in order to check the system design and to do the debug work