An 11M-triangles/sec 3D graphics clipping engine for triangle primitives

The paper describes a clipping engine, which processes the view clipping, perspective division, and view-port mapping of 3D graphics. The complexity of the polygon clipping algorithm causes difficulties in implementing hardware. We propose a clipping algorithm that shows 3.07 times higher performance than a conventional algorithm. In addition, we propose a scheme to improve performance up to 57% by eliminating redundant calculations of overlapped vertices without additional hardware. We implement the clipping engine in 0.13 μm CMOS technology. It processes 11M-triangles/sec at 166 MHz and has 156 kgates.