Why is the Frame Buffer beneficial on the new BT820B Embedded Video Engine (EVE)?

Our new BT820B has a frame buffer in external DDR3 SDRAM. The frame buffer is an area of RAM which contains the full bitmap of the screen. Like our other EVE family devices, the BT820B still generates display content based on a Display List, created using commands and instructions from the host MCU via SPI/QSPI. This object-oriented approach allows you to create comprehensive user interfaces quickly and easily, with minimal workload on the host MCU.

By rendering the content to a frame buffer instead of directly to the screen line-by-line, more complex graphics can be generated. Combined with the 16Kbyte Display List (now twice the size of earlier EVE devices), this makes the BT820B ideal for creating more complex and feature-rich user interfaces on larger and higher-resolution displays (up to 1920 x 1200).

For example, the frame buffer enhances rendering performance in applications with numerous scrolling charts and readouts such as medical bedside patient monitors. In our Utah Teapot demo, it allows the BT820B to render thousands of lines to produce a smoothly rotating wireframe shape. For applications using live video (via the BT820B’s video input) the frame buffer architecture enables real time video to be incorporated into user interfaces without sacrificing performance.

The frame buffer enhances performance for applications such as the bedside monitor and Utah Teapot