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GUI Products


PEG Pro™

A High-Performance Graphical User Interface Solution


Summary

PEG Pro™ offers developers of embedded graphical user interfaces (GUIs) a proven software solution for creating complex, high-color depth embedded graphic applications. Designed specifically for use in the development of GUI applications in automotive, consumer electronics, infotainment and medical devices, PEG Pro runs on a wide variety of real-time operating systems (RTOSes) and microprocessors.

• Reduce development time and costs
• Rapid user interface development
• Resolve product usability issues before committing to physical design
• Flexibility in selecting the processor/graphics controller
• Standardize on a graphics software solution across products
• Differentiate your product with a sophisticated user experience

PEG Pro enables the design of sophisticated embedded graphics by supporting the key features and advanced applications demanded by interactive devices such as navigation systems, cell phones, gaming systems and medical electronics.

PEG Pro accelerates product delivery by providing robust functionality such as drag-and-drop visual development tools and the ability to begin development on a Windows or Linux platform. Key features include unlimited graphics layers, per-pixel and per-layer alpha blending, bitmap rotation and scaling, screen transitions, text rotation and complete anti-aliasing of all drawing primitives. In addition, PEG Pro provides run-time selection of themes to allow end-users to tailor their experience. PEG Pro supports a wide range of color depths up to 32 bits per pixel (bpp).

PEG Pro includes a broad set of basic control types such as buttons, text gadgets, animations, menu-list display and bitmap display objects. All of these display widgets can be fully customized, both at compile time and at runtime. PEG Pro offers advanced classes such as treeview, spreadsheet and charting classes. Rotated screen mounting is seamlessly supported.

PEG WindowBuilder™ is a complete visual layout and design tool included with PEG Pro. PEG WindowBuilder automatically generates embedded C++ source code that is ready to be compiled and linked into the application. This visual development environment allows for rapid prototyping of embedded interfaces, validating the design concepts and usability for key stakeholders by adding an interactive device “frame” to the graphics window simulation.

Custom user-supplied control types, graphics and fonts can easily be incorporated within the PEG WindowBuilder environment, allowing custom interfaces to be designed using simple drag-and-drop techniques. Interface personalization is further simplified through resource files which may be compiled within the application or provided on the device for run-time selection of new themes and language support.

Unlike other solutions, PEG Pro GUI elements can be fully tailored, allowing OEMs to create user interfaces that maintain and accurately reflect the company’s brand image – not one which another company has selected for you.

PEG Pro graphics can be overlaid on real-time video and alpha blended using multiple graphical layers. The PEG Pro library is easily configured for a variety of display resolutions, orientations and color depths, supporting a wide range of color formats up to 32 bits per pixel (bpp).

Anti-aliased fonts and line drawing allows the rendering of high-quality interfaces demanded by today’s users. Industry leading multi-lingual application support includes full Unicode and SJIS character encoding support, and string table editing and string resource file generation facilities incorporated within the WindowBuilder StringTableEditor.

PEG Pro is written with the embedded market firmly in mind, meaning that the value of every feature is weighed against the code size and performance requirements for that feature.

A minimum PEG Pro footprint requires roughly 150K of code space, 8K of stack space and 32K of dynamic memory. A typical full-featured GUI requires a PEG Pro footprint of roughly 220K code, 8K stack and 32K dynamic memory.

PEG Pro is fully integrated with RTOS messaging, memory management and synchronization services to provide the lowest possible overhead and a true real-time multitasking GUI environment. PEG Pro input devices are interrupt driven, and again use RTOS services to communicate user input information to the graphical user interface.

PEG Pro can also be configured to support multiple GUI tasks. These tasks can be of differing priorities and can each directly create, display and control any number of GUI windows or child controls. This advanced capability is unique to the design of PEG Pro.

PEG Pro provides a set of hardware and OS encapsulation classes which allow the PEG Pro user interface to run as a standard 32-bit Windows or X11 application. In addition, users can create and test the entire user interface while using the very mature Windows® or Unix application development tools. PEG Pro supports leading Unix platforms including Linux®, LynxOS®, NetBSD® and Solaris®. The flexibility to begin work on a Windows/X11 development platform accelerates product delivery by allowing developers to simply re-compile the PEG Pro library and application software for the target device with the customers preferred target development tools.

The PEG Pro library has been fully verified with all the most popular embedded compilers including Green Hills® MULTI®, Metrowerks CodeWarrior™, MetaWare, IAR®, ARM® ADS and RVDS, Borland®, Microsoft®, Hitachi, STMicroelectronics, Paradigm®, Watcom, GCC, Tasking™, TI Code Composer™, Analog Devices VisualDSP++™, and Microtec C/C++.

PEG Pro can be configured to support any combination of mouse, keyboard, touch-screen or membrane keypad input.

PEG Pro can be used with nearly any 32-bit embedded CPU. PEG Pro performance is enhanced through the use of hardware accelerated graphics controllers supporting multiple layers and 2D graphics acceleration. A partial list of supported CPU types includes:

• Altera® NIOS® II family of cores
• ARM9™ & ARM11™ architectures
• ARC® cores
• Atmel® AT91SAM9261, AT91SAM9263 and AT91RM9200
• Cirrus Logic Maverick™ family of processors
• Freescale ColdFire®, i.MX, and PowerPC® family of processors
• Intel 80386, Pentium, Itanium, Athlon, and other x86 derivatives
• Hitachi SH family of processors
• Marvell® PXA family of processors
• MIPS® R3000®, R4000™ architectures
• Texas Instruments DaVinci™ & OMAP™ family of processors ARM9™ & ARM11™ architectures

PEG Pro supports color depths of 16-bpp (65K), 16-bit + alpha, 24-bpp (TrueColor) RGB or BGR, and 24-bit + alpha (ARGB). For application requirements at lower color depths, Swell Software offers a range of products targeted to these applications. Any x, y display resolution may be used, including custom resolutions and profile orientation or rotation of the display device. Many CPUs include built-in video/LCD control, while external video/LCD controllers may also be used.

For More Information

• Access the manual.
• Try a free evaluation kit.