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Created January 20, 2019 19:05
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iCE40 Text Mode core
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ice40-text-mode.md

iCE40 Text Mode video

Overview

Main specs

  • 240x64 screen area
  • 8x16 glyphs
  • 2 sets of 256 possible glyphs
  • X/Y flips of glyphs
  • Multiple drawing / color mapping modes

Block diagram

      ,--------,            ,--------,             ,--------,
      |        |            |        |             |        |
X/Y ->| Screen |->[ char ]->| Glyph  |->[ pixel ]->| Color  |->[ output color ]
      | Memory |   +attr    | Memory |      ,----->| Memory |
      |        |     \      |        |     /       |        |
      '--------'      \     '--------'    /        '--------'
                       \_________________/

Implementation notes

  • The implementation actually produces 2 pixels at once to be able to support 1080p output on the UP5k

  • The screen memory and glyph memory are implement using 1 SPRAM each. The color memory uses two EBR block

  • Because two pixels are produces at once, we need to do two lookups in color memory, so we need two blocks with the same content to have two read ports

  • External read write access to those memory is allowed via a bus interface, the core manages the access sharing between the bus interface and the video lookups.

    • During the active portion of the video area, the Screen memory only requires 1 lookup every 4 cycles and Glyph memory only 1 lookup every 2 cycles. So those memory can be accessed without much issues at any time.

    • The color memory however is needed by the video core at every cycle during the active portion of the video and any bus access will stall until either horizontal blanking or vertical blanking.

Sreen memory

Address mapping :

,---------------------------------------------------------------,
| f | e | d | c | b | a | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
|---------------------------------------------------------------|
| 1 | 0 |           Y           |               X               |
'---------------------------------------------------------------'

Screen memory is mapped from 0x8000 to 0xbfff with each location representing one character on screen.

Data mapping :

,---------------------------------------------------------------,
| f | e | d | c | b | a | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
|---------------------------------------------------------------|
|         attributes            |          char                 |
'---------------------------------------------------------------'

Each data word contains the actual character to fetch from the glyph memory along with some attributes that will configure how to draw it on-screen

Glyph memory

Address mapping :

,---------------------------------------------------------------,
| f | e | d | c | b | a | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
|---------------------------------------------------------------|
| 1 | 1 | s |              char             |       Y       | X |
'---------------------------------------------------------------'

Glyph memory is mapped from 0xC000 to 0xFFFF with each location representing the color index of 4 pixels.

  • s: Which character set the glyph belongs to
  • char: Character index in that char set
  • Y: line
  • 'X': msb of the X position. 0=left half, 1=right half

Data mapping :

,---------------------------------------------------------------,
| f | e | d | c | b | a | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
|---------------------------------------------------------------|
|      px0      |      px1      |      px2      |      px3      |
'---------------------------------------------------------------'

px0 being the left most pixel and px3 being the right most one.

The value of these field is what's going to be used, in combination with the attributes from the screen memory to perform the final color lookup in the color memory.

Color Memory

Address mapping :

,---------------------------------------------------------------,
| f | e | d | c | b | a | 9 | 8 | 7 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 0 |
|---------------------------------------------------------------|
| 0 | 0 |      (reserved)           |  palette  |  color index  |
'---------------------------------------------------------------'

The color memory contains 16 palettes of 16 colors. How the lookup is performed depend on which drawing mode is active for the current character. Refer to the 'drawing mode` section below.

Data mapping :

The 16 bit word is directly provided to the input. In practice when connected to a 3-bit HDMI PMOD, only the 3 LSBs are used.

Drawing mode

Attribute field format :

,-------------------------------,
| f | e | d | c | b | a | 9 | 8 |
|-------------------------------|
|                       | m | s |
'-------------------------------'
  • m: Define the drawing mode for this character (see below)
  • s: Define which character set to use

Palette mode

,-------------------------------,
| f | e | d | c | b | a | 9 | 8 |
|-------------------------------|
|    palette    | X | Y | 0 | s |
'-------------------------------'

In this mode, the palette field of the attribute is combined with the px? value from the glyph to perform the lookup into the color memory and obtain the final color.

This mode also allows to perform X and Y flip of the glyph.

Direct mode

,-------------------------------,
| f | e | d | c | b | a | 9 | 8 |
|-------------------------------|
|    fg     |    bg     | 1 | s |
'-------------------------------'

In this mode, a foreground and a background color are specified directly in the attributes.

Assuming px is the value from the glyph, color lookup is done like this :

  • 0000: Perform lookup in palette 0 for color index bg
  • 0001: Perform lookup in palette 0 for color index 8+fg
  • Other value: Perform lookup in palette 1 for color index px

This allows to have color 0 and 1 of the glyphs be mapped to 8 possible background and 8 possible foreground colors. Those can be freely chosen and defined in palette 0, the first 8 entries being background colors and the last 8 entries being foreground colors.

If the glyph uses other colors, then those are looked up directly in palette 1. This way the glyph can also use static colors that don't depend on the defined foreground and background color for that character.

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