A 33.2M vertices/sec programmable geometry engine for multimedia embedded systems

The paper proposes a programmable geometry engine (GE) reducing the expensive internal buffers and register files of the conventional programmable GEs and sharing the datapaths of a special function unit. The proposed GE is appropriate for the embedded 3D graphics environment where the reduction of hardware cost is a critical issue. The degraded performance caused by the hardware reduction is compensated by a variable write-back timing architecture with a dynamic hazard controller and a data forwarding method. The GE is implemented by a 0.13 μm CMOS technology and has the performance of up to 33.2M vertices/sec, which is 1.66 times improvement on previous work. Its equivalent gate count is 206k and operating frequency is 166 MHz.