A minimized hardware architecture of fast Phong shader using Taylor series approximation in 3D graphics

One of the most successful algorithms that bring realism to the world of 3D-image generation is Phong shading. But, Gouraud shading has been used instead of Phong shading because of per pixel computation and hardware costs. However, with continuous improvement of VLSI technologies and request for higher realism, real-time Phong shading will be the next technology-push in 3D graphics. Taylor series approximation is an algorithm of fast Phong shading algorithms that is appropriate for hardware implementation. But, the hardware implementation of this algorithm requires a large ROM table that induces an overhead in terms of hardware size. We reduced this overhead by minimizing the ROM table size while keeping visual quality through visual comparison. We minimized a large ROM table size of a uniform quantization method to 1/64 using an adaptive-compressed non-uniform quantization method. By minimizing the ROM table size, we could minimize the total hardware size to 1/56