Digital PV Link Light: A Simple Video Interface for High-Resolution Displays

Digital PV Link Light (or DPVLL in short) supports super high resolution displays, such as 3M-pixel (2048x1536) and 9.2M-pixel (3840x2400) displays, by using a selective refresh technique, which allows a graphics chip to send only modified areas in the screen to the display. For the display side, the DPVLL architecture assumes a frame buffer to store the entire image of the screen since the graphics chip transmits only a part of the image at a time. For the graphics side, on the other hand, the DPVLL architecture assumes only graphics-chip functions that are commonly supported by current-generation graphics chips. Namely, a hardware panning function, a hardware cursor, and a vertical retrace interrupt. Hence, the architecture does not require hardware modifications for most graphics chips. The DPVLL architecture, however, assumes a thin software layer in the display driver to enable the selective refresh. We have developed a DPVLL prototype system that drives an IBM 9.2M-pixel panel by using an ATI RADEON card via a single-link DVI channel We developed the device driver for DPVLL jointly with ATI Technologies Inc.. This paper describes hardware and software mechanisms that enable the selective refresh in DPVLL.