ILI9488 TFT SPI display library for AMD Xilinx SoC and FPGA

[Viktor Nikolov]

Hi!

In a project of mine, I want to use this 3.5″ 480x320 TFT SPI display based on the ILI9488 display controller. 

I, therefore, ported the ILI9488 Arduino library for use on AMD Xilinx SoC and FPGA. The integral part was porting of the Adafruit_GFX library because the ILI9488 library is based on it. I removed all Arduino-specific code, optimized SPI writes for the capabilities of Xilinx SPI libraries, and made other modifications.

I published the library and sample projects on the GitHub repository.
You can see the capabilities of the library in this video.

I tested the library on AMD Xilinx Zynq-7000 SoC and Artix-7 FPGA (running on MicroBlaze soft CPU).
The repository contains sample projects that run on Digilent boards Zybo Z7, Arty A7 and Cmod A7.

I also provided a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to use the display on the Zynq board Cora Z7.

The library supports both Zynq Processing System SPI and AXI Quad SPI IP.
The library also supports both Zynq Processing System EMIO GPIO and AXI GPIO IP.

Different kinds of SPI and GPIO can be combined (e.g., you can use AXI SPI with PS GPIO and vice versa). All four combinations are supported by the library. Three out of four combinations are showcased by the sample projects in the repository.

I tested the ILI9488 library with a standalone application running on ARM core or MicroBlaze. I believe it should also work on a PetaLinux app.

Viktor

Edited February 7 by Viktor Nikolov
link to the tutorial added