I'm considering a project which involves displaying essentially static
content on 4 15" LCDs.  Essentially static being defined as "If it can
be done cheaper at the expense of update rate, then let's make it
cheaper."  I'm thinking updating maybe once per minute.

I'd like to keep the hardware as cheap as possible.  I don't need to
do anything fancy, but one thing I do want to avoid is seeing the
screen slowly update - even though it's only updating once a minute or
so, I want the update to happen instantly.  The data for a new image
could come over USB, or a memory card, or whatever's convenient.  I
can always create a data path later, the thing I'm working on now is
the actual driving of four displays.

So the best I've come up with is using a cheap FPGA and some
reasonably fast SDRAM with enough space to hold two images - one
buffer, and one active.  This would be around 18MB for 4 displays of
1024x768x24bit imagery.  Unfortunately this runs to 540Mbytes/second
of memory throughput not counting updating the memory (1024x768 pixels
* 3bytes * 4 screens).

And from there the cost just goes up since I can't easily use an off
the shelf fpga board for this since the memory requirements are so
interesting.  I could get 4 separate FPGA boards, though.  I suppose a
high end FPGA board with DDR ram would do it, but cost is high.

I'd prefer not having 4 PCs running, but have considered getting a
cheap computer with several VGA adaptors and windows XP.  Would be
nice if it were smaller with lower power requirements though.  Might
be the cheapest option, and certainly the easiest/quickest to develop
for.

So...  Suggestions?  Any FPGA boards I should look at?  Alternative methods?

-Adam

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