Articles
Product Availability
December 12, 2000
In early October 1999, the company completed development of a fully demonstrable prototype synthesized into an FPGA to drive a 160x128 pixel touch screen LCD. Product demonstrations were performed to key industry experts on several occasions. The concept was received with great enthusiasm. In these demonstrations, several HTML web pages including bitmaps and live instrumentation data viewers were authored using the Symantec Visual Page program, compiled, and loaded into 256 bytes of EEPROM --the process took approximately 5 minutes. A 500 byte server program on an 8 bit ATMEL AVR microprocessor served the pages and instrumentation data to the browser over a 19.2kBaud RS232 connection where the pages appear on the LCD display instantaneously.
Subsequently, in June 2000 beta test began on a revised FPGA to drive a 320x240 touch screen LCD, with the data being served and stored in serial flash memory. July 2000 began the final development phase with product being synthesized into an ASIC and finalization of the controller board design.
Presently the company is awaiting production quantities and anticipates shipping product at a price of $399 4th quarter 2000.
