A 1.2Mpixels/s/mW 3-D Rendering Processor For Portable Multimedia Application

Abstract

A 1.2Mpixles/s/mW 3D rendering processor is designed and implemented for portable multimedia application. A sustained 20Mpixels/s pixel fill rate is obtained at 10MHz with the help of embedded depth buffer and recursive sub-block mapped texture cache. In order to achieve low power rendering operation, SlimShader architecture with non-atomic read-modify-write scheme and logarithmic datapath is employed. The rendering processor consists of 281k logic gates and 164kB embedded SRAM in 25mm2. It is fabricated in 0.18mum 1-poly 6-metal CMOS logic process and real-time 3D graphics images are successfully demonstrated on the system evaluation board. It consumes 17mW at 10MHz while drawing texture-mapped 3D graphics images