Can I use ADP-21489 as a general MCU?

You can certainly connect a display to the DAI and bit bang it as a data bus. I wouldn't call it efficient, but it could be done.

You could also use the 21489 data bus. Sometimes LCD display drivers are very slow and need additional buffers just to slow down everything. Not a problem with DAI.

In general DSPs like the 21489 are very good general purpose microcontrollers as long as they have the peripherals that you need for your application. Of course, they may be more than you need from a MIPs point of view.

Depending the the display requirements, you can also find displays with serial interfaces such as SPI, UART or I2C. These are all supported via the DPI and would be easier to use and program.

Al Clark

www.danvillesignal.com

To add to Al's suggestions, you could also add a $1 CPLD as glue logic to convert between one of the serial interfaces and your LCD. This would then allow you to use DMA transfers and significantly reduce program overhead to manage the screen updates.

Klaus

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