Spotlight On
A spotlight on 4D Systems
Following an explosive adoption of intuitive GUIs into commercial and industrial products, 4D Systems is at the heart of this trend, developing leading display technology – modules, graphics processors and IDE for almost any application. Here, we shine September’s spotlight on Markku Riihonen, business development manager at 4D Systems who talks about the growth and how he became involved in the industry
Markku Riihonen
The company has really started to take off in the last three to four years, why do you think this has happened?
T
oday there are very few embedded designs on the market that don’t incorporate some form of display interface. And as consumers, the event of the smart phone and tablet has made us fairly demanding in terms of the quality and ease-of-use that we expect from a display interface. Even many consumer white goods and kitchen appliances incorporate some form of display. Buttons, rotary selectors, switches and other input
36 September 2018
devices are being replaced by more colourful and easier-to-use touch screen displays in industrial machines, thermostats, drink dispensers, 3D printers, commercial applications – virtually any electronic application. All of this has put pressure on manufacturers and designers of devices to include a touch-enabled graphical user interface in their designs, whether that is new products or upgrading existing products with a new look and feel. Having said that, designing a colour display with touch is not that straightforward and special expertise is required. Our business evolved from developing intelligent display modules and development software that allows designers and product developers to quickly and easily design in a display without requiring specialist expertise. All of this, along with an increasing preference for designers to use modular solutions rather than building something themselves from scratch has really given our business a boost over the last few years.
What benefit is there to developers in using a module in their design?
The key benefit to using a module is clearly faster time to market, particularly when it comes down to designing a display. To do this from scratch, there is a considerable amount of groundwork a designer has to do before they can begin to design the actual graphical user interface. This includes finding the right display, finding a controller for the display, writing the drivers for the display and eventually writing the code to show graphics on the display. By using a
Components in Electronics
module that is virtually ready to run out of the box, an engineer can focus on the core aspect of the project and forget about the lower level design. For example, a designer working on a coffee machine is concerned with delivering the perfect coffee at optimum temperature, delivered to the cup in a certain amount of time, not on perfecting the graphical user interface that instructs the consumer what to do. So this allows manufacturers to get their products out to market faster, cutting development overheads and freeing up engineers’ time for further innovation in the core product.
How easy is it for manufacturers to just upgrade existing displays without having to start again from scratch?
With intelligent modules like those we supply, it’s very simple. In fact, once a 4D Systems display module has been designed in, it is possible to simply recompile the code for various sizes of displays without having to rewrite any code. The only task at hand therefore is to rework the graphical elements to adapt to a new display resolution. If a manufacturer is intending to
replace, for example, an old character display with a full colour display with touch functionality, they do not need to start from scratch. The onboard graphics processor (DIABLO16) on our display modules handles all the graphics-related tasks and takes these over from the host. This means that all graphics are developed using Workshop4 IDE, our
development environment, which makes the GUI design and development very easy. All that is left to do in addition for the manufacturer, is to develop a simple serial library for their host to talk to the module if there isn’t one available. Additionally, the Workshop4 IDE includes a development environment called Visi- Genie, which allows designers to create a graphical user interface without having to write any code at all. Last but not least, there are volumes of applications out there that have been developed on 8-bit microcontrollers but an 8-bit microcontroller cannot drive a full graphics display. If a manufacturer were to upgrade an application that is run by an 8-bit micro, they would need to move over to 32-bit architecture and basically start from scratch. However, utilising our display modules removes this requirement. You could almost say that we enable 8-bit microcontrollers to drive full colour displays. In fact, over the last several months we have been working with Mikroelektronika and Microchip in developing 4D Display Click. This allows plug and play hardware interface to any development board with the mikroBUS socket. Currently we’re working with both in enabling easy software configuration into their development tools to bring full colour graphics into the hands of many developers that use 8-bit microcontrollers.
You recently opened a new factory in the Philippines, why was this and how is the facility performing now?
Over the last few years, we’ve
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