VLSI Architectures for Computer Graphics

Abstract

Both academic researchers and commercial concerns are increasingly interested in applying VLSI technologies to graphics systems:

• For researchers, graphics systems offer an attractive model for study of computer architectures in VLSI: these systems have a small well-defined set of operations and simple data and control structures, making these systems ripe for applying parallelism and modularization techniques; many of these systems, especially the interactive high-resolution color ones, have severe computation demands that are unfulfilled by solutions embodied in current systems.

• For commercial concerns, there is a rapidly increasing market for interactive graphics systems as personal workstations in which graphics displays replace text-only terminals.

  In this paper, we cover: a) the conceptual organization of a “generic” graphics system and its realization in several state-of-the-art commercial products; b) the architecture of several recent VLSI chips and systems and their likely effect on the organization of future graphics systems; c) the architecture of several VLSI-based systems that are currently subjects of research. The design strategies used in these systems — the structure of parallelism, intertwining of data and computation, the tradeoff between custom and off-the-shelf parts — may provide insights into other applications as well.

This research was supported in part by the (USA) National Science Foundation under grant ECS-8300970 and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contract DRAG 29-83-K-0148.