From compact control screens to high-resolution smart control panels, Ameba builds its HMI smart display solution on a range of Wi-Fi chips, covering display and interaction needs at different performance levels.

Different screen specifications and graphics requirements call for different Ameba chips. Thanks to the Ameba SDK, LVGL and a layered software architecture, the upper-layer UI and business logic can be reused across Ameba chips. The software also invokes the matching graphics acceleration or an optimized software rendering path according to each chip's hardware resources, so every chip plays to its own strengths.

01 | Selection

Fit for Diverse Smart Display Needs

The first step in evaluating an HMI solution is to match hardware resources to screen specifications. Instead of "one chip for every scenario", Ameba offers chips covering four display interfaces, with different resolutions and performance levels.

02 | Development

From UI Development to Hardware Upgrades, Keep Reusing Your Software

The challenge of cross-platform work has never been driving a single screen. It is whether, when a product line moves from a low-end knob screen up to a high-definition color screen, you can keep as much of your existing software work as possible.

The Ameba SDK uses a layered HAL decoupling architecture that encapsulates the hardware differences between chips and display interfaces in the lower layers. The upper-layer GUI logic, UI components and business code interact only with a unified interface layer. When a product moves from a QSPI design to RGB, or from RGB further to MIPI DSI, developers only need to complete the corresponding hardware adaptation to reuse their existing LVGL UI and business code, with no need to redevelop the entire UI project.

Beyond decoupling the low-level drivers, for building the application-layer UI the Ameba SDK integrates LVGL deeply and supports 30+ common UI widgets, and provides the LVGL Pro visual development tool. The SDK includes product-grade example projects: Widgets (widget interaction), Music (animation and long-list scrolling), Benchmark (performance benchmark) and Stress (extreme stress test). Developers can tick them in the graphical configuration menu to build and run a demo with one click, greatly shortening the solution validation cycle.

03 | Performance

Hardware-Software Co-design to Unleash Each Chip's Graphics Power

Under the unified software framework, the hardware resources of different chips are not identical. For tasks such as layer blending, image decoding and UI rendering, how can each chip make full use of its own hardware while reducing CPU load?

☆ Hardware Graphics Processing and Display Support

On chips equipped with hardware acceleration modules (such as RTL8721F / RTL8730E), Ameba integrates several dedicated graphics and display accelerators. Under specific test conditions, hardware-software co-optimization can reduce CPU usage by up to 60%.

PPE (Pixel Processing Engine): Supports hardware blending of up to three image layers, pixel format conversion (e.g., RGB565 and ARGB8888), and image rotation (90°/180°/270°) and scaling.
MJPEG hardware decoder: Supports hardware decoding of JPEG images. Decoding and post-processing are done mainly by dedicated hardware with almost no CPU involvement, which suits HD backgrounds, boot animations and similar image display needs.
LCDC display controller: Supports display timing configuration and pixel format conversion, flexibly adapting to display panels of different specifications; in 8080 interface mode, it supports TE signal synchronization to reduce screen tearing.

★ Software Adaptation to Different Hardware Resources

Not every Ameba chip carries all the accelerators, but every one of them can run LVGL.

The Ameba SDK selects the graphics processing path according to the chip's hardware configuration. When PPE / MJPEG is present, hardware acceleration is invoked automatically; on models without accelerators, the software layer automatically falls back to a highly optimized software rendering path.

Developers do not need to write two sets of rendering logic for different chips. When the UI is migrated across the whole chip family, each chip delivers the best rendering experience its current hardware can offer.

04 | Resources and Technical Support

Ameba has fully opened the HMI smart display SDK, development documentation and example project source code, helping teams quickly complete technical evaluation and product launch:

📲 [Ameba SDK Source Download ]

📖 [ Ameba HMI Development Guide ]

📋 [ Ameba HMI Solution & Selection ]