Parallel polygon/pixel rendering engine and method.

摘要

A parallel polygon/pixel rendering engine for a digital map capable of producing real-time linear shaded, three dimensional, raster graphics for video generation is suitable for use with avionic display systems, particularly digital map displays which include an instruction and interpreter unit and an image scanner. The apparatus comprises a raster engine (12), a memory interface (14) and a bit mapped memory (16). The raster engine further includes a raster engine control and generic interpolation polygon processor interface (62), an edge interpolator (64), a line interpolator (68) and a controller (74) for the edge and line interpolators. The raster engine control is electrically connected to receive data from the instruction interface unit and is further electrically connected to the edge interpolator (64) and interpolator controller (74). The edge interpolator is adapted to receive data from the raster engine control and the line interpolator is electrically connected to receive data from the edge interpolator. A first edge pipeline (70) is connected to a second output of the raster engineer control (62) and a second edge pipeline (72) is connected to an output (K) of the first edge pipeline (70) as well as an output (X) of the edge interpolator (64). An output (KX) from the second stage (72) of the edge pipeline and a plurality of outputs from the line interpolators (68) are then fed to a memory interface which is connected to receive data from the plurality of outputs. A bit mapped memory (16) is also connected to receive data from the memory interface (14) and control signals from a bit mapped memory controller (20). The bit map memory controller controls the memory interface components and the bit map memory during both normal and test modes.