LTDC internal peripheral

Article purpose

The purpose of this article is to:

• briefly introduce the LTDC peripheral and its main features
• indicate the level of security supported by this hardware block
• explain how each instance can be allocated to the three runtime contexts and linked to the corresponding software components
• explain, when necessary, how to configure the LTDC peripheral.

Peripheral overview

The LCD-TFT (Liquid Crystal Display - Thin Film Transistor) Display Controller peripheral (LTDC) is used to provide an interface to a variety of parallel digital RGB LCD and TFT display panels. The LTDC generates the parallel digital RGB (Red, Green, Blue) signals and the related control signals (horizontal and vertical synchronizations, Pixel Clock and Data Enable). Moreover, the LTDC is connected to the DSI internal peripheral that provides an interface to communicate with MIPI^® DSI-compliant display panels.

Features

Refer to the STM32MP15 reference manuals for the complete list of features, and to the software components, introduced below, to see which features are implemented.

Security support

The LTDC is a non-secure peripheral.

Peripheral usage and associated software

Boot time

The LTDC is used at boot time for displaying a splash screen thanks to the U-Boot framework .

Runtime

Overview

The LTDC internal peripheral is allocated to the Arm^® Cortex^®-A7 non-secure core to be controlled in Linux^® by the Linux DRM/KMS framework.

Chapter Peripheral assignment describes which peripheral instance can be assigned to which context.

Software frameworks

Domain	Peripheral	Software frameworks			Comment
		Cortex-A7 secure (OP-TEE)	Cortex-A7 non-secure (Linux)	Cortex-M4 (STM32Cube)
Visual	LTDC		DRM/KMS framework

Peripheral configuration

The configuration is applied by the firmware running in the context to which the peripheral is assigned. The configuration can be done alone via the STM32CubeMX tool for all internal peripherals, and then manually completed (particularly for external peripherals), according to the information given in the corresponding software framework article or in the LTDC device tree configuration article for Linux^®.

Peripheral assignment

Internal peripherals assignment table template

| rowspan="1" | Visual
| rowspan="1" | LTDC
| LTDC
| 
| ☐
|
|
|-

|}

How to go further

Refer to STM32 LTDC application note (AN4861) for a detailed description of the LTDC peripheral and applicable use-cases.

Even if this application note is related to STM32 microcontrollers, it also applies to STM32 MPUs.

References