You can find many ARM processors with integrated LCD drivers.  Haven't
seen any 8-bit processors with one, though (well, except for small
segment displays of 160 or fewer segments).

One of the issues seems to be memory - not only does it have to drive
the LCD, but manage a whole chunk of memory as well, which means that
the PIC has to have much more I/O.

A mechanism where the LCD and memory are sharing data lines works well
as a hack, but isn't very flexible, and would limit the number of
displays that can be supported.

So for now most people rely on external controllers, or LCDs with
built in controllers when using a low end processor.

Interesting notes about font stuff, though.  I just went through using
GIMP and some custom utilities to convert a font to a C program, and
then including it in my source.

Antialiasing it was a snap from there.  Now I've got to look at
converting more fonts, and dealing with proportional fonts.

-Adam

On 6/7/07, Harold Hallikainen <harold@hallikainen.org> wrote:
> I'm finding more and more applications where I have to drive a color
> graphics LCD. We have a system running with a CPLD and SRAM where the CPLD
> generates the high speed parallel video for the display, pulling the data
> from SRAM, and also allowing the PIC to read and write the SRAM. It SEEMS,
> though, that this should be a relatively common application, and that such
> an LCD controller should be on the PIC (or on the display module). Is
> anyone aware of such a micro (or a family of display modules that have
> their own frame buffers)?
>
> By the way, I'm having fun with Unifont (http://czyborra.com/unifont/).
> Yesterday I wrote a small perl script that takes the native Unifont format
> and converts it into PIC24 .pbyte lines with the first two bytes holding
> the Unicode character number. If the character is 16 bits wide, instead of
> 8, it takes two table entries with the second one having a Unicode number
> of 0xffff. On receiving characters to display, I intend to do a binary
> search through the table, then put up the appropriate character. Anyway,
> Unifont looks interesting...
>
> Harold
>
>
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