Design and Implementation of Universal Buffer Compression andecompression Unit for Mobile 3D Graphic System
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Lok, Ka-Hang
Abstract
In recent years, the market of mobile electronics grows rapidly. Meanwhile, 3D graphics becomes more and more important in mobile or portable devices, where energy efficiency is the most important design challenge. To reduce the power consumption, it is shown that the amount of external memory access is the most crucial factor. For better visual quality, more and more data is processed by the mobile graphics processor units (GPUs), thus suffering from higher and higher external memory bandwidth. Therefore, it is clear that large amount of external memory access in graphics systems causes not only the energy consuming problem but also the performance bottleneck, and compression techniques aiming at saving memory bandwidth become more and more important. Furthermore, mobile GPUs face larger challenge than its desktop counterpart. First, the limitation of small form factor restricts the hardware resources available. Moreover, the distance from the display of the mobile device to human eyes is quite closed, resulting to a rather large average eye-to-pixel angle in opposition that for a desktop. For this reason graphics on mobile devices should be better than on their desktop counterparts.n this thesis, we present a universal compression and decompression algorithm for the buffer data, aiming to reduce the hardware cost as little as possible. Since DXTC has been supported for the graphics API such as DirectX and OpenGL, there is always a DXTC unit in the graphics processors, here the universal algorithm is mainly designed to give the first place to color and depth data. However, some modifications using the same concept as for color and depth data has been added to the DXTC method to enable better visual quality. The unified of these units should be the future trend in designing mobile GPUs.ntegrated with the proposed unit above, a low power graphics processing units for mobile multimedia applications is implemented in this thesis. The prototype chip is fabricated by $UMC$ 90nm technology, and the chip size is 4.1$ imes$4.1$mm^2$. The designed working frequency is 143MHz, and the worst case power consumption is 158mW (with about 28mW consumed by the proposed codec unit).
Subjects
GPU
compression
SDGs
Type
thesis
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