A low-power 3D rendering engine with two texture units and 29-Mb embedded DRAM for 3G multimedia terminals

A low-power three-dimensional (3-D) rendering engine with two texture units and 29-Mb embedded DRAM is designed and integrated into an LSI for mobile third-generation (3G) multimedia terminals. Bilinear MIPMAP texture-mapped 3-D graphics can be realized with the help of low-power pipeline structure, optimization of datapath, extensive clock gating, texture address alignment, and the distributed activation of embedded DRAM. The scalable performance reaches up to 100 Mpixels/s and 400 Mtexels/s at 50 MHz. The chip is implemented with 0.16-μm pure DRAM process to reduce the fabrication cost of the embedded-DRAM chip. The logic with DRAM takes 46 mm² and consumes 140 mW at 33-MHz operation, respectively. The 3-D graphics images are successfully demonstrated by using the fabricated chip on the prototype PDA board.