A 22.4 mW competitive fuzzy edge detection processor for volume rendering

A low power competitive fuzzy edge detection (C-FED) processor is proposed for gradient calculations in volume rendering. Its linearized fuzzy membership function reduces overall power by 35.1% and the proposed hardware sharing between computation stages reduces power consumption by 18%. Threshold adaptive bit control scheme is proposed to predetermine background pixel with simple operation which results in 13% power reduction. Overall power consumption is reduced by 53.8%. Its power consumption and energy per pixel is 22.4 mW and 0.14nJ/pixel, respectively, at 1.8-V supply. The fabricated processor occupying 450 μm × 450 μm in a 0.18 μm CMOS process achieves 1821.5fps for the input image of 300 × 300 pixels at 200 MHz operating frequency.