Embedded Vertex Shader in FPGA

Abstract

Real-time 3D visualization of objects or information becomes increasingly important in everyday life e.g. in cellular phones or mobile systems. Care should be taken in the design and implementation of 3D rendering in such embedded devices like handhelds devices in order to meet the performance requirement, while maintaining power consumption low. In this work, the design and implementation of a vertex shader on a reconfigurable hardware is presented. The main focus is placed on the efficient hardware/software partitioning of the vertex shader computation, in order to maximize the performance while maintaining a high flexibility. The resulting solution must be compatible to existing vertex shaders in oder to allow the large amount of existing program to be easylly ported to our platform. A prototype consting of a PowerPC, peripherals and some custom hardware modules is realized a on an FPGA-board. The implementation of a point rendering shows considerable speed up compared to a pure software solution.