Designing an optimal single chip FPGA video interface for embedded systems

This work presents the design methodology and the optimal FPGA implementation of a hardware video interface that can be used in any embedded system with microprocessors or microcontrollers for direct connection to a VGA compatible monitor. The design level is lowered to schematic details, which offers more optimization possibilities than any hardware description language. Such a visual design was efficient only by using the new “Altium Designer” software environment, which permits the drawing of portable schematics that can be implemented without changes inside FPGAs from different producers. The interface logic occupies only 3% of combinational resources and 2% of sequential resources when implemented on a Spartan-3 FPGA chip, leaving enough space for the entire system integration.