Articles

Amulet has developed a technology to provide a better, more efficient method to program graphical user interfaces for embedded systems. It has achieved this by building a "user interface browser" on a chip which features high level GUI objects that interact with the user input hardware and the resources of other serially connected microprocessors.

The GUI Browser is a graphical client driven by a markup language. The markup language features hypertext ability to provide links to different types of information from many remote sources. The Amulet GUI Browser is a small hardware component (ASIC) designed to remove the burden of GUI execution from the resource starved 8 bit processors.

Amulet's partitioning of work leaves the main application processor free to more efficiently execute the product functionality -- this translates to a smaller processor with less RAM and ROM in addition to a smaller code development and maintenance effort. Elements that require a response to events generated by the user or the embedded processor are linked to event "callback" routines through HTML hypertext links.

Although the HTML can be viewed on a conventional web browser during prototyping, ultimately it is compiled to Amulet's proprietary format called µHTML to reduce its size and execution requirements prior to viewing on the Amulet UI browser hardware. The µHTML is served to the Amulet UI browser hardware through a serial interface from either the embedded processor, or another serial memory device. The UI browser hardware renders the interface to the LCD, interacts with the user input hardware and updates the display to provide visual cues to acknowledge user events and processor events without burdening the main application processor.

Amulet Technologies, LLC