Pipelined architecture for patterned halftone generation

摘要

The present invention is a super-scalar method and apparatus for the generation of halftone dot patterns in an image processing system. The super-scalar design employs at least one block of memory for the storage of at least one predetermined halftone dot pattern across a plurality of unique locations therein, and a sequencer for producing an index into said memory as a function of the position of the pixel along a scan line and the halftone dot characteristics. Also included is addressing circuitry for memory access control, to combine the index produced by said sequencer and a pixel value for the pixel to produce a memory address, the memory address being thereby employed to access one of said locations in memory and to cause said memory to output a signal representative of a portion of the halftone dot pattern stored at the unique addressed location.