Genode FX: an FPGA-based GUI with Bounded Output Latency and Guaranteed Responsiveness to User Input

This paper presents a composition of hardware and software that forms a fully fledged windowed GUI on a single FPGA plus memory chip. The solution scales with the full range of Xilinx FPGAs. But even on the low-cost Xilinx Spartan3A FPGA, the GUI operating at a 16bit resolution of 640x480 is able to guarantee a bounded output latency of only 220 ms and a guaranteed response time to user input of less then 20 ms. The paper covers both an overview of our custom hardware design and our software algorithms that make these guarantees possible.

genode-fpga-graphics-2009.pdf — PDF document, 704Kb