We had done great stuff with VGA on the FPGA platform, which ran at 48 MHz, but wouldn't it be absurd and wonderful to connect your microcontroller straight to an HD TV with no other electronics in between? This seemed unlikely to work out, but I stayed up at night playing around with assembly loops, and I could not convince myself that DVI was out of reach. In fact, there was overlap between the maximum system clock, and the TMDS bit clocks of slower DVI video modes. RP2040 was designed to run at 133 MHz, but we found (without too much surprise) that typical silicon can be pushed further.
I couldn't convince myself the idea was too stupid to work, so I took a leap of faith on it, and the results are documented here. This project stems from a stupid idea I had during RP2040 bringup. 264 kB SRAM, 2x Cortex-M0+, system clock 252 MHz
Bitbanged DVI on the RP2040 MicrocontrollerĦ40x480 RGB565 image, 640x480p 60 Hz DVI mode.
