External EEPROM Research Articles

Design of a TFT-LCD Based Digital Automobile Instrument

The traditional mechanical instrument lacks the ability to satisfy the market with characters of favorable compatibility, easy upgrading, and fashion. Thus the design of a TFT-LCD (thin film transistor-liquid crystal display) based automobile instrument is carried out. With a 7-inch TFT-LCD and the 32-bit microcontroller MB91F599, the instrument could process various information generated by other electronic control units (ECUs) of a vehicle and display valuable driving parameters on the 7-inch TFT-LCD. The function of aided parking is also provided by the instrument. Basic principles to be obeyed in circuits designing under on-board environment are first pointed out. Then the paper analyzes the signals processed in the automobile instrument and gives an introduction to the sampling circuits and interfaces related to these signals. Following this is the functional categorizing of the circuit modules, such as video buffer circuit, CAN bus interface circuit, and TFT-LCD drive circuit. Additionally, the external EEPROM stores information of the vehicle for history data query, and the external FLASH enables the display of high quality figures. On the whole, the accomplished automobile instrument meets the requirements of automobile instrument markets with its characters of low cost, favorable compatibility, friendly interfaces, and easy upgrading.

E2Flash — all the memory on one chip

In many cases non-volatile memory is required for automotive applications. Users often try to emulate external EEPROM using the microcontroller's internal flash memory for commercial or technical reasons. This frequently fails due to the limited number of write/erase cycles, the restricted operating temperature range during the flashing procedure and due to inappropriate memory segmentation. Renesas presents a combination of code flash; this controller offers simultaneous writing and erasure during program code execution and meets exacting requirements for write/erase cycles, data retention and operating temperature range.

C07: Compact data acquisition module for the applications of meteorological measurements

The aim of this work was to design and realize a compact module of data acquisition. This module was designed for the applications of meteorological measurements of barometric pressure, temperature and relative air humidity. The main parts of this module are above all 8-bit microcontroller with digital and analog ports, external EEPROM memory for storage of the measured data, LCD display for their actual visualization and RS232 interface for communication and transfer of data to PC. These data can be then visualized and browsed on a PC with a simple Delphi program MeteoView