FPGA-based arabic LCD display controller IP design

Abstract

A 2x16 character Liquid Cristal Display (LCD) is one of the most common Input/Output (I/O) devices. It allows designers to communicate with the outside world. Alphanumeric LCD can display English and some other special characters. However, Arabic characters cannot be displayed since the Arabic fonts are not embedded in the LCD controller, thus there are no corresponding American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) codes for it. To allow Arabic display on an LCD module and reduce designs’ time, we suggest to create an Intellectual Property (IP) core for Arabic character LCD display controller. The design was done by creating a block diagram of the LCD controller and interface it to a clock divider module and an IP core memory namely a Block Random Access Memory (BRAM). The whole design was initialized and tested using VHDL codes. The LCD initialization is done using some specific commands. These commands allow Arabic characters to be generated and read from the Character Generator RAM (CG RAM) which is one of the controller’s memory regions. The complete LCD module was described and synthesized using Xilinx Integrated Synthesis Environment (ISE) design suite tools, and implemented and tested using Xilinx Virtex 5 Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Digilent Genesys board. After creating the needed design, a simulation of each component has been made using a test bench VHDL code. However, Displaying Arabic characters using FPGA couldn’t be achieved due to lack of time and some problems, mainly changing the FPGA board, wasting time in working on some other Xilinx tools and lack of the needed documentations. Moreover, once we implemented the design LCD displayed just a cursor blinking to show clearly that the generated character couldn’t be displayed .It has not been well introduced in the CGRAM of the controller. What we suggest is to try to reuse those commands and test it once again since the same method works once we tested it on a microcontroller.