Design of a geometry engine for mobile 3D graphics

Recently, portable devices employ applications using 3D graphics such as 3D games and 3D navigations. The portable devices require small area and low power consumption. We propose architecture for a geometry engine for 3D mobile graphics. The proposed geometry engine consists of a transformation engine and a lighting engine. The transformation engine employs two step culling scheme which reduces the complexity of pipelines. The lighting engine has variable pipelines depending on the lighting effects and the number of lighting sources. The geometry engine supports the 32 bit single precision format of the IEEE-754 standard and the reduced 24 bit floating point format for mobile environment. We design a geometry engine based on the proposed architecture using Verilog-HDL and synthesized it using a 0.25 um CMOS standard cell library at 100 MHz. It is verified by simulation and implementing on an FPGA.