Arm-2D GPU

Arm-2D is not a GPU but an abstraction layer for 2D GPUs dedicated to Microcontrollers. It supports all Cortex-M processors ranging from Cortex-M0 to the latest Cortex-M85.

Arm-2D is an open-source project on Github. For more, please refer to: https://github.com/ARM-software/Arm-2D.

How to Use

In general, you can set the macro LV_USE_GPU_ARM2D to 1in lv_conf.h to enable Arm-2D acceleration for LVGL.

If you are using CMSIS-Pack to deploy the LVGL. You don't have to define the macro LV_USE_GPU_ARM2D manually, instead, please select the component GPU Arm-2D in the RTE dialog. This step will define the macro for us.

Design Considerations

As mentioned before, Arm-2D is an abstraction layer for 2D GPU; hence if there is no accelerator or dedicated instruction set (such as Helium or ACI) available for Arm-2D, it provides negligible performance boost for LVGL (sometimes worse) for regular Cortex-M processors.

We highly recommend you enable Arm-2D acceleration for LVGL when:

  • The target processors are Cortex-M55 and/or Cortex-M85

  • The target processors support Helium.

  • The device vendor provides an arm-2d compliant driver for their propriotory 2D accelerators and/or customized instruction set.

  • The target device contains DMA-350