A high speed outline front rasterizing LSI

A description is given of a high-speed outline front rasterizing LSI, the Font Graphics Accelerator (FGA), for desktop-publishing applications. A filling algorithm that is easy to implement and assures the correct filling has been developed for the FGA. The FGA has dedicated hardware that rasterizes a Bezier curve at an average of 200 ns/dot by sequentially dividing the curve. It also has a digital difference analyzer for generating lines and arcs. Using this hardware it can generate Japanese kanji characters at an average rate of 4000 characters/s. The chip was fabricated with 1.2- μm double-metal-layer CMOS technology, and operation at 20 MHz has been achieved