A cost effective lighting processor for 3D graphics application

This paper presents a cost effective VLSI architecture to calculate RGB color in 3D graphics lighting stage. Phong illumination model Ell is exploited for lighting. In addition, the proposed architecture also supports point light sources, spot light sources, and infinite light sources suggested in OpenGL(R)**. These various light models are widely used in entertainment and game applications. We choose appropriate fix-point representation in this architecture, which is different from traditional floating-point geometry processor. Color accuracy is taken into account under fix-point simulation in MESA 3D graphics library. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture can achieve 1.5 M polygons/sec and be integrated with 3D graphics rasterization stage cost-effectively.