WPG World Peace Group launches automotive digital instrument cluster solution based on NXP products

On September 21, 2022, WPG Holdings, a leading semiconductor component distributor dedicated to the Asia-Pacific market, announced that its subsidiary WPI has launched an automotive digital instrument panel solution based on the NXP i.MX RT1170 microcontroller.

Figure 1- A display board of WPG's automotive digital instrument panel solution based on NXP products

As the interactive interface between people and cars, the car dashboard provides drivers with information on vehicle operating parameters and is an indispensable part of the car. From the first generation of mechanical dashboards to the second generation of electrical dashboards, and then to today's third generation of digital LCD dashboards, as digital technology is continuously applied to dashboards, the displayed content has become richer and the functions have become more powerful. In addition, with the rapid development of the new energy vehicle industry in recent years, the penetration rate of automotive digital dashboards has continued to rise. Against this background, WPG World Peace has launched an automotive digital dashboard solution based on the NXP i.MX RT1170 microcontroller, which can not only intuitively and accurately display the various attributes of the vehicle, but also bring drivers a more intelligent interactive experience.

Figure 2-Application scenario of WPG's automotive digital instrument panel solution based on NXP products

NXP's i.MX RT1170 MCU is NXP's first GHz-class microcontroller. It adopts a dual-core design with an Arm Cortex-M7 core with a main frequency of up to 1GHz and a 400MHz Cortex-M4 core. It also provides advanced security and supports a wide temperature operating range. It has excellent computing power, multiple media functions, real-time functions, and is easy to use, making it an ideal choice for digital instrument clusters.

This solution is based on the i.MX RT1170 design. The high-performance Cortex-M7 core is used as the main core to focus on image display processing. The energy-efficient Cortex-M4 is used as the slave core to receive vehicle information such as speed, mileage, and power through the CAN bus, and then transmit it to the main core through the MU (Messaging Unit) data transmission unit and display it on the instrument interface. In addition, the solution uses the open source lightweight display graphics library LVGL, the LCD screen resolution is 720x1280, and with the help of general graphics acceleration engine, vector graphics processing, multi-layer optimization and other strategies, the display effect is improved and the frame rate is increased.

Figure 3-Block diagram of WPG's automotive digital instrument panel solution based on NXP products

With the help of the powerful functions of the device, the LCD display part of this solution has a total of six interfaces, namely the home page interface, navigation interface, instrument interface, tire pressure interface, music interface, and chart interface, which are used to display the properties of the vehicle instrument panel in detail.

Core technology advantages:

Dual -core communication function:

i.MX RT1170 has a high-performance and energy-efficient dual-core. After the chip is powered on, the main core APP is started first. The main core APP contains the code to load the slave core APP segment to realize the function of the main core activating the slave core. Communication between dual cores is a very important link in the dual-core system. The i.MX RT1170 dual-core supports four communication resource sharing methods. This solution uses the MU data transfer unit to transmit data.

Graphics acceleration function:

Before the image is displayed on the monitor, the i.MX RT1170 can accelerate, generate or mix graphics content through graphics accelerators such as PXP, LCDIFv2, VGLite, etc. to optimize the display effect.

PXP module:

The LCD screen used in this solution is a 720x1280 vertical screen. The horizontal image generated by LVGL is processed by the rotation engine of PXP to generate new buffered vertical data rotated 90 degrees. The rotation process takes about 8ms.

LCDIFv2 module :

The solution implements the navigation function by adopting a multi-layer mixed overlay strategy through the LCDIFv2 module. The module supports up to 8 layers of mixing, and each layer can be configured with different color formats, encoding formats, sizes, positions, and mixing modes.

 VGLite module:

VGLite is a lightweight 2D graphics API with small memory usage and low CPU usage, which speeds up user interface drawing and improves refresh rate.

Program Specifications:

Support AEC-Q100;

 i.MX RT1170 crossover MCU with a main frequency of 1GHz;

Support PXP, LCDIFv2, VGLite image accelerators;

 LCDIFv2 can blend up to 8 layers.