An FPGA based coprocessor for 3D affine transformations

3D graphics performance is increasing faster than any other computing application. Almost all PC systems now include 3D graphics accelerators for games, Computer Aided Design (CAD) or visualization applications. This paper investigates the suitability of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) devices as a low cost solution for implementing 3D affine transformations. A proposed solution based on processing large matrix multiplication has been implemented, for large 3D models, on the RC1000-PP Celoxica board based development platform using Handel-C, a C-like language supporting parallelism, flexible data size and compilation of high-level programs directly into FPGA hardware.