Five Key Design Considerations for Intelligent Multi-Display Systems

Larger, higher-resolution displays and the significant detail required for multiple displays necessitate stronger processing capabilities, which often leads to increased system power consumption and thermal management. Using dedicated processing cores like Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) helps mitigate these design considerations. Scalable product lines provide designers with devices that can deliver the required power and thermal performance for a given system. These products are designed to offer suitable GPU performance for a range of devices, with options available for those that do not require a GPU. Texas Instruments’ HMI application processor series, such as AM623 (without GPU) and AM625, AM62P, and AM67X (with GPU) (as shown in Table 1) can assist designers in adding higher resolutions and immersive graphics while delivering outstanding performance within specified power or thermal budgets.

To make faster decisions, there is a need to visualize and process more data, which drives the use of larger and higher-resolution displays. Intelligent displays utilize smart and analytical capabilities to present more data to users in a better, more actionable format, addressing this design challenge. To optimize integrated analytical systems in intelligent HMI applications, designers can select a development platform that includes devices with appropriate processing capabilities and hardware accelerators, as well as comprehensive software and tool products.

Adding analytics or machine learning capabilities to displays can enhance the user experience and may also integrate intuitive gesture control, predictive maintenance, and user or context-adaptive displays in more systems. Adding these new features requires stronger processing capabilities. Texas Instruments’ integrated analytical processor product series provides dedicated accelerators for optimizing performance and includes additional processing cores for handling other functions. Similar to GPU options, designers may need options with and without accelerators to effectively meet the design requirements across the product line. Texas Instruments’ AM67X series devices offer options with AI accelerators and without AI accelerators, providing multiple processor options with unified platform support to enhance design scalability and reusability.

With the introduction of more display types, sizes, and resolutions, multiple physical interface options are needed to meet performance expectations. Higher resolution screens require Low-Voltage Differential Signaling (LVDS), Display Parallel Interface (DPI), Mobile Industry Processor Interface (MIPI), Display Serial Interface (DSI), and processors that support these interfaces. Driving multiple displays to enhance the user experience requires the use of multiple interfaces on the same processor. When selecting a processor, screen size, resolution, and design cost are some of the important criteria.

For example, a cost-effective system for single-screen designs may only require DSI. However, if the system is richer in functionality, with higher resolution displays and multiple screens, it may require screens with LVDS or DPI interfaces. As functionality increases, the system needs high-speed interfaces like USB3, Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe), and Camera Serial Interface (CSI) to communicate with the rest of the environment. Texas Instruments’ AM6x series supports various interfaces in different configurations to meet these evolving design requirements.

While flexible hardware design options allow designers to optimize systems for several factors, including cost, these choices may lead to fragmented software architectures that are difficult to scale and maintain, resulting in lower design efficiency and potentially higher design costs. Designers and leadership teams often need to consider the total cost of ownership for HMI products and select scalable and flexible software architectures that can support the addition of extra features (such as graphics libraries) to seamlessly leverage accelerators to optimize the overall design work.

Texas Instruments’ software development kits (SDKs) for common open-source operating systems like Linux^® and Android™ lay a solid foundation for building this efficiency. Foundational software elements that scale across product lines can be written once and then deployed across different designs. For example, security features required by multiple products. Writing and maintaining multiple Over-The-Air (OTA) update products or managing different secure boot flows due to underlying software differences is a manifestation of fragmentation that reduces design efficiency and increases costs and time (even leading to additional costs).

Figure 1 showcases how Texas Instruments’ AM6x series provides foundational software to build efficient software products that can scale to accommodate hardware differences without incurring costly fragmentation processes.

To allow users to start enjoying the powerful new features of intelligent displays, designers must be able to integrate them into real products. While there are differences in expertise and capabilities among teams, the required ease of use may vary, but certain common driving factors still need to be considered. Tools for common tasks can reduce the required expertise and greatly enhance usability. In addition to tools for specific tasks throughout the design process (from circuit board design and layout to production programming), Texas Instruments also offers a free online tool Edge AI Studio to help simplify the implementation of AI in intelligent displays. Combined with required documentation and training resources, designers can more easily adapt to the challenges in the design process.

While these five considerations are not exhaustive, they can help designers seamlessly integrate multi-display intelligent HMI into an ever-expanding product line. Innovations in human-machine interfaces have already been realized.