November 12, 2018

Editor’s Note: This content is contributed by Chetan Khona, Xilinx Industrial IoT Strategy

When was the last time you looked at a screen? Okay, that was a trick question, because unless you’re in the tree-killing business or your name is Moses and you have an affinity for stone tablets, you’re looking at one right now. You don’t have to be in a Dire Straits music video to realize screens are everywhere these days. As automation increases in factories, in vehicles, and in hospitals, screens are the best way to keep tabs on what’s happening. Real-time status is critically important. Here are a few examples: a hospital patient monitor, outlier notification on an operator panel, and fuel consumption analytics from a locomotive. 

If data is present, there is typically value in displaying it. The term “data gravity” implies that processing is geographically attracted to data, and that holds true for visualization as well. After the cloud computing revolution, edge processing is THE major trend. Zynq® UltraScale+™ MPSoC is the most popular choice for real-time embedded edge processing applications. Therefore, it might surprise you to know that the EG and EV variants of Zynq UltraScale+ devices have a built-in GPU. With this separate architectural block, the data you have being processed in your Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC can also be visualized easily at up to 4k resolutions.

The Mail™-400 MP2 GPU in Zynq UltraScale+ supports OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 for impressive 2D and 3D graphics with dedicated shader cores and features. These features include alpha blending, to support unlimited number of blended layers without additional bandwidth consumption or unexpected performance drops, and full scene anti-aliasing (FSAA), using rotated grid multi-sampling for significantly higher quality and performance than alternative oversampling methods. It comes with fully optimized production quality software drivers to provide maximum efficiency with low memory fragmentation, reduced integration time and cost, and reduced support burden. Like many things in embedded electronics, the hardware is nice, but it needs to be paired up with optimized software to make the experience great.

Xilinx is running a webinar on November 15 with DiSTI Corporation, the folks behind GL Studio, the most reliable user interface (UI) tool for when your display is critical in avoiding a disaster—like in the cases mentioned above in hospitals, factories, and large heavy moving vehicles where lives and property are at stake. You have an AI-class SoC with Zynq UltraScale+ with an unmatched functional safety pedigree for IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 applications. GL Studio is an award-winning tool that is used extensively in industrial, medical, automotive, and commercial and military aviation applications.

If you have a GPU, why not use it; we all have an artist inside us! Please register for the November 15 webinar titled Modernized Operator Panels for the Era of Industrial IoT by clicking on this link. It will be available video-on-demand if you miss the live event. And be sure to learn more about Xilinx solutions for Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) by visiting our page on the topic.