Area-power efficient lighting unit architecture based on hardware sharing

A shared lighting unit architecture suitable for mobile 3D graphics is presented. Sharing of resources is achieved by reusing a unitary vector operation, and diffuse and specular components calculation. Balance between area and power dissipation was compared with a more prevalent parallel unit architecture implementation. Results indicate that parallel implementations of the proposed shared units lead to much better area × power efficiency as more of these units are used for higher processing performance.