D/AVE NX – 2D/3D OpenGL ES 2.0 vector graphics IP core

Licenseable IP core for ASICs and FPGAs

D/AVE NX Highlights

  • 2D/3D OpenGL ES 2.0 GPU core with ES 3.x extensions and vector graphics hardware acceleration
  • High scalability (1 Shader Unit with 4 ALUs up to 4 Shader Units with 32 ALUs)
  • Extremely Low-Footprint OpenGL ES driver with bare-metal, RTOS and Linux support
  • MinnieVG vector graphics API optionally to OpenGL ES 2.0
  • Offline Shader Compiler Support

D/AVE NX is the latest and most powerful addition to the D/AVE family of rendering cores – but still designed for resource constrained systems! It is the first GPU bringing 2D and 3D OpenGL ES 2.0 vector graphics rendering with some ES 3.0 / 3.1 and vector graphics acceleration extensions into the world of MCUs, entry-class MPUs as well as FPGAs.

D/AVE NX is targeted for graphics applications with displays up to 4K x 4K resolution in the Consumer, Low-Power / Wearable, Industrial, Medical, Defense, Automotive and Avionics markets. It can be scaled easily to fit exactly into the resource / performance sweet spot for a particular product, bringing full 3D graphics even down to MCU class devices and into safety critical applications. Entire device families can be equipped with differently scaled variants of the core, making all of them fully software compatible. A single unified software stack and the guarantee to produce exactly the same visual result (at different speeds) allows saving significant development resources.

D/AVE NX is highly efficient as the internal multi-level scheduler can maximize the utilization of every hardware element even better than the fixed function pipeline of the successful D/AVE-2D and -HD cores could. Scheduling also does not have to be precomputed in the compiler, simplifying the compiler and driver architecture considerably.

The D/AVE NX OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL drivers are designed for memory-constrained systems such as MCUs with bare-metal, RTOS, or Linux operating systems. The optional offline shader compiler support brings down the RAM requirements to a few Mbytes.

By enabling the use of programmable shaders even on small devices, high quality 2D and full 3D applications can be realized using the D/AVE NX core. Support for the industry standard API OpenGL ES 2.0 allows for rapid development of high-end user interfaces by leveraging common GUI frameworks like LVGL, Qt, SCADE or Guiliani and makes new, future-proof implementations possible.

Additionally to the OpenGL ES 2.0 API also a simple to use, procedural vector graphics API, MinnieVG, is available providing OpenVG-like 2D/2.5D vector graphics functionality with analytical anti-aliasing and (subset) support for SVGs. MinnieVG provides a carefully selected set of functionalities that enables the development of modern graphics applications for non-graphics professionals and accelerates time to market.

Download:
D/AVE NX Product Brief

D/AVE NX Demos Embedded World 2025
D/AVE NX + AnSys Scade Cockpit Demo

D/AVE NX Feature & Technology Overview

System Features

  • Scalability throughout the entire design
    • 1 - 4 shader units
    • 4 - 32 ALUs per shader unit (2 operations per ALU per cycle)
    • Optional Special-Function & I/O Units
    • Configurable cache sizes and optional 2nd level cache
    • Up to 4k resolution
    • Exact same driver can be used on all versions – enables the same output at different speeds
  • Unified Shader Architecture
    • Fully IEEE compatible floating point ALUs
    • True integer arithmetic (8bit, 16bit, 32bit)
  • Massively parallel execution with fine grained Multithreading
  • Immediate mode rendering (no need to buffer entire scene description)
  • Application optimization and debugging support
  • Pipelined architecture for high clock frequencies
  • System security features

Rendering

  • 2D and 3D OpenGL ES 2.0 vector graphics API      
    • OpenGL ES 3.0 / 3.1 extensions
    • OpenGL extensions for flash-based textures
    • Optional offline shader compilation
  • MinnieVG 2D / 2.5D OpenVG-like vector graphics API on top of OpenGL ES
    • Points, lines, (round-)rectangles, ellipses, polygons with Analytical Anti-Aliasing (AAA)
    • Paths, strokes, fills, paints (linear / radial / conic gradients, patterns) and transformations
    • Size-optimized MIB file format with SVG import (subset only)
    • Support for HW-accelerated D/AVE NX n-Polygons
  • High render quality
    • Highly accurate sub pixel positioning, interpolation, and filtering
    • Multi-Sample and Coverage (n-Polygon) Anti-Aliasing (MSAA, CSAA) and Analytical Anti-Aliasing (AAA)
  • BC1 Texture Compression
  • Framebuffer Compression
  • Hardware supported blending
    • Normal alpha blending
    • Linear color-space blending
  • Various texture formats
    • BC1, 8 bit alpha/luminance, ARGB4444, ARGB1555, RGB565, ARGB8888 etc.
    • Floating point texture support
    • 3d and cube-map textures and 2D texture array support
  • Various framebuffer formats
    • 8 bit compressed, ARGB4444, ARGB1555, RGB565, ARGB8888 etc.
  • Frame buffers and textures up to 4k x 4k pixels
D/AVE NX Block Diagram

Download:
D/AVE NX Product Brief

Software

OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL Drivers

TES provides open-source OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL drivers. Both drivers rely on a low-level D/AVE NX driver layer, abstracting hardware details like register access and making porting to different CPUs / Operating Systems easy.

  • Fully reentrant & thread-safe
  • Minimal OS dependency supporting bare-metal, RTOS and POSIX (e.g. Linux) based systems
  • Support for multiple D/AVE NX instances
  • Multi-threading support, i.e. multiple applications can use D/AVE NX concurrently
  • Small memory footprint 

Shader Compiler Options: Compilation at runtim or Offline Shader Compilation

Beside the OpenGL standard workflow of GLSL shader compilation at runtime via the CPU, the D/AVE NX software stack also offers two options of offline shader compilation into an interim SPIR-V format or into GPU binary code. These options allow saving significant amounts of RAM and are key for making D/AVE NX suitable for MCU based architectures with internal RAM only. 

MinnieVG 2D/2.5D vector graphics library

MinnieVG is a specialized 2D / 2.5D vector graphics library designed specifically for resource-constrained embedded systems where industry standards like OpenVG are too heavy. It is distributed under the terms of the MIT open-source license and can optionally be used on top of the D/AVE NX OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL drivers. Please find more information and the MinnieVG repositories under the following links:

D/AVE NX Graphics Turnkey System Solution for Altera SoCs

TES delivers a complete reference system solution for Altera SoCs (e.g. Stratix 10, Arria 10 and Agilex 5) supporting selected reference boards including:

  • Yocto Linux OS
  • OpenGL ES 2.0 and EGL drivers for D/AVE NX and CDC
  • Native OpenGL ES 2.0 example applications as source code
  • MinnieVG drivers and example applications as source code
  • Build scripts to check out required repositories (Yocto Linux, meta layers, drivers, …) and build the D/AVE NX demo SD card image as well as the complete SDK.
  • D/AVE NX as Megacore IP block (QSys component)
  • CDC Display Controller as Megacore IP block (QSys component)

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