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Little Board™/486e Technical Manual
1–2
VL-Bus Flat Panel/CRT Display Controller
A powerful and flexible local bus video display controller interfaces with both flat panels and CRTs,
and offers full software compatibility with all popular PC video standards (VGA, Super VGA, and
VESA). All standard resolutions up to 1280 x 1024 pixels and 16 million colors (True Color, in 640 x
480 VGA) are supported. Refer to Tables 3-1 and 3-2 for video specifications. 2M byte of video
memory is standard. The display controller features:
! High-speed VL-Bus Architecture. The video controller provides an optimized 32-bit path
between the CPU and video memory.
! Graphical User Interface (GUI) Accelerator. This feature can dramatically boost the
performance of Windows
®
, Windows
®
9x, and many graphics-intensive applications.
! Color Flat-Panel Support. Up to 16M colors can be displayed on TFT LCD flat panels and up
to 226,981 colors on STN LCD panels.
! Display Centering and Stretching. A variety of automatic display centering and stretching
techniques can be employed when running lower resolution software on a higher resolution
display.
! Color Simulation/Reduction. Color is automatically converted to gray-scale on most
monochrome LCD panels, using a Frame Rate Modulation (FRM) and dithering techniques.
! Standard Panel Support in the VIDEO BIOS. The VIDEO BIOS supports a number of
standard flat-panel displays, selectable from the system SETUP menu.
An optional external adapter board can provide an adjustable LCD bias power supply and power
sequencing control.
Enhanced Embedded-PC BIOS
One of the most valuable features of the Little Board/486e CPU is its enhanced embedded-PC
BIOS. Its extensive function set meets the unique requirements of embedded system applications.
These enhancements include:
! Watchdog timer—monitors the boot process and provides a watchdog function call for
applications
! Fast boot operation—normal or accelerated POST, selectable by SETUP options
! Configurable POST display—selects what displays at boot time
! Fail-safe boot support—intelligently retries boot devices until successful
! Battery-free boot support—saves system SETUP information in non-volatile EEPROM
! Serial console option—lets you use a serial device as a console
! Serial loader option—supports loading boot code from an external serial source
! EEPROM access function—512 bits of EEPROM storage available to user; useful for
serialization, copy protection, and security
! OEM customization hooks—can execute custom code before system boot through ROM
extensions; allows sophisticated system customization without BIOS modification