(A) 36fps SXGA 3D display processor with a programmable 3D graphics rendering engine

Abstract

3D graphics hardware has been developed enormously for various multimedia devices and game consoles in recent years. The 3D graphics hardware has changed from a fixed-pipeline hardware to a programmable hardware, which expresses almost infinite 3D effect. But true reality is not being provided to users due to insufficient computing power and the lack of depth perception in 2D display. The technologies of 3D display, a probable next generation display, realize stereoscopy and make viewers feel realistic 3D effect. However, current 3D displays visualize only preprocessed static pictures and video data and not support interactive and real-time applications like 3D games or GUI, because a complex image processing is required to synthesize 3D images from two view images (a left view image and a right view image) and a disparity map; the disparity map is calculated from the depth of 3D objects. This paper presents a SXGA (1280x1024) 3D display processor with a programmable 3D graphics rendering engine which can synthesize 3D images in real-time; 36frames/s. The processor consists of two engines, a 3D graphics rendering engine and a 3D image synthesis engine. The 3D graphics rendering engine contains a pixel shader which is a programmable hardware. It supports a high-end standard Pixel Shader 3.0 and a latest mobile standard OpenGL ES 2.0. The 3D image synthesis engine optimizes the memory accesses, which increases the synthesis rate to interactive rate. The synergetic coupling of the 3D image synthesis engine and the rendering engine enables users to experience the true reality in real-time interactive 3D applications like 3D games and GUI. The target display of this research is a 9-view slanted lenticular display. The die contains 1.74M gates and occupies 5mm x 5mm in 0.18 micro CMOS and dissipates 379mW at 1.8V.