ASIP-based control system for LED matrix display

Along with the increasing applications of light emitting diodes (LEDs), the need for flexible LED controllers is also increasing. A general purpose processor provides excellent flexibility. However, compared to hard-wired controllers, it provides relatively low performance and its exact operation execution time is hard to predict. In addition, they are more expensive than other types of controllers. This paper presents a 16-bit processor-based LED controller, which consists of an application specific instruction set processor and several peripheral modules. Using a software program, the proposed LED controller provides the flexibility to implement various control schemes with small hardware revision. As using real-time operations only, the programmer can predict the execution time of operations exactly. We implemented the proposed LED controller using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The FPGA implementation of the controller runs at 100 MHz, and the system successfully displays motion pictures on the test LED matrix panel of 16×64 RGB pixels.