A Power-Area Efficient Geometry Engine With Low-Complexity Subdivision Algorithm for 3-D Graphics System

Abstract

In this paper, a power-area efficient geometry engine (GE) using a low-complexity three-level subdivision algorithm is presented. The proposed subdivision algorithm and architecture is capable of providing low complexity, high power-area efficiency, scalable and near-Phong shading quality. The forward difference, edge function recovery, dual space subdivision, triangle filtering, and triangle setup coefficient sharing schemes are employed to alleviate the redundant computation for the proposed algorithm. According to the low-complexity subdivision algorithm, one reconfigurable datapath is proposed to save the area since the same set of processing elements (PE) is reused for different operations of GE. Compared with the conventional subdivision algorithm, the proposed subdivision algorithm reduces the number of memory/register accesses for subdivision by 40% and 60.32% for level-1 and level-2 subdivision, respectively. In terms of the number of multiplications for transforms, the reduction can be attained by 27.5% and 60.27% for level-1 and level-2 subdivision, respectively. From the implementation results, the proposed GE can achieve the power-area efficiency of 518.8 K vertices/(s.mW.mm(2)) for level-1 subdivision.