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Over the last decades, integrated circuits have changed our everyday lives in a number of ways. Many common devices today taken for granted would not have been possible without this industrial revolution. Central to the manufacturing of integrated circuits is the photomask used to expose the wafers. Additionally, such photomasks are also used for manufacturing of flat screen displays. Microlithography, the manufacturing technique of such photomasks, requires complex electronics equipment that excels in both speed and fidelity. Manufacture of such equipment requires competence in virtually all engineering disciplines, where the conversion of geometry into pixels is but one of these. Nevertheless, this single step in the photomask drawing process has a major impact on the throughput and quality of a photomask writer. Current high-end semiconductor writers from Micronic use a cluster of Field-Programmable Gate Array circuits (FPGA). FPGAs have for many years been able to replace Application Specific Integrated Circuits due to their flexibility and low initial development cost. For parallel computation, an FPGA can achieve throughput not possible with microprocessors alone. Nevertheless, high-performance FPGAs are expensive devices, and upgrading from one generation to the next often requires a major redesign. During the last decade, the computer games industry has taken the lead in parallel computation with graphics card for 3D gaming. While essentially being designed to render 3D polygons and lacking the flexibility of an FPGA, graphics cards have nevertheless started to rival FPGAs as the main workhorse of many parallel computing applications. This thesis covers an investigation on utilizing graphics cards for the task of rendering geometry into photomask patterns. It describes different strategies that were tried and the throughput and fidelity achieved with them, along with the problems encountered. It also describes the development of a suitable evaluation framework that was critical to the process.

Asynchronous bus interface units to AMBA AHB are designed so that an OpenGL ES 2.0 vertex shader can communicate with other hardware units via AHB bus under different working frequencies. The first design is to directly implement an asynchronous AHB wrapper for the vertex shader. The other two designs are based on Open Core Protocol (OCP) to allow for more flexibility. The hardware intellectual property (IP), vertex shader in this thesis, to OCP asynchronous unit is designed so that the IP can be developed independently with different bus protocols as long as the OCP-to-bus interface is provided for a particular bus protocol. With the help of asynchronous IP-to-OCP and OCP-to-AHB interface units, the vertex shader IP can operate at different frequencies from the AHB bus. Furthermore, the same vertex shader (VS) can be connected to other bus protocol (such as AXI) of different frequencies if the OCP-to-AXI interface is provided because the the asynchronous VS-to-OCP have been designed in this thesis.

Graphics processing unit (GPU) designs usually adopts various computer architecture techniques to boost the computation speed, including single-instruction multiple data (SIMD), very-long-instruction word (VLIW), multi-threading, and/or multi-core. In OpenGL ES 2.0, user programmable vertex shader (VS) hardware unit can be designed using vectored SIMD computation unit so that it can efficiently compute the matrix-vector multiplication, one of the key operations in vertex transformation. Recently, high-performance GPU, such as Telsa series from nVidia, is designed with many-core architectures with each core responsible for scalar operations. The intention is to allow for efficient execution of general-purpose computations in addition to the specialized graphics computations. In this thesis, we design a scalar-based multi-threaded GPU design that is composed of four scalar processors, one special-function unit, and can execute multi-threaded instructions. We use the example of vertex transformation to demonstrate execution efficiency of the scalar-based multi-threaded GPU. We also make comparison with the vector-based SIMD GPU.

¡@¡@An embedded system has improved quickly in recent years and now functions like a small computer. Equipped with operating systems (OS), graphic user interfaces (GUI), and software developed for various platforms, an embedded system provides users with services more powerful and friendlier than ever. Qt/Embedded and OpenGL ES are an OS and a GUI developed for embedded systems. In this thesis, We integrated Qt/Embedded with OpenGL ES on a Versatile PB 92EJ-S and conducted various tests. ¡@¡@The Versatile PB 92EJ-S was equipped with ARM926EJ-S, an onboard chip capable of performing VFP9 vector floating operation. However, not all embedded systems are powered by a floating coprocessor. To make the test results applicable to all systems, We performed only fixed-point operations, a practice also improving the overall performance. In addition, to provide communications between OpenGL ES and Windows and interfaces for OpenGL ES to draw, We implemented EGL, a platform interface layer defined in OpenGL ES. Furthermore, We developed GLUT ES, a modification of GLUT, to make the embedded system compatible with Windows of different versions. Finally, We benchmarked the platform with programs developed by GLUT ES interfaces and OpenGL ES.

<p>The company where this thesis was formulated constructs VR applications for the medical environment. The hardware used is ordinary dektops with consumer level graphics cards and haptic devices. In medicin some operations require microscopes or cameras. In order to simulate these in a virtual reality environment for educational purposes, the effect of depth of field or focus have to be considered. </p><p>A working algorithm that generates this optical occurence in realtime, stereo rendered computer graphics is presented in this thesis. The algorithm is implemented in OpenGL and C++ to later be combined with a VR application simulating eye-surgery which is built with OpenGL Optimizer. </p><p>Several different approaches are described in this report. The call for realtime stereo rendering (~60 fps) means taking advantage of the graphics hardware to a great extent. In OpenGL this means using the extensions to a specific graphic chip for better performance, in this case the algorithm is implemented for a GeForce3 card. </p><p>To increase the speed of the algorithm much of the workload is moved from the CPU to the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). By re-defining parts of the ordinary OpenGL pipeline via vertex programs, a distance-from-focus map can be stored in the alpha channel of the final image with little time loss. </p><p>This can effectively be used to blend a previously blurred version of the scene with a normal render. Different techniques to quickly blur a renderedimage is discussed, to keep the speed up solutions that require moving data from the graphics card is not an option.</p>

<p>Over the last decades, integrated circuits have changed our everyday lives in a number of ways. Many common devices today taken for granted would not have been possible without this industrial revolution.</p><p>Central to the manufacturing of integrated circuits is the photomask used to expose the wafers. Additionally, such photomasks are also used for manufacturing of flat screen displays. Microlithography, the manufacturing technique of such photomasks, requires complex electronics equipment that excels in both speed and fidelity. Manufacture of such equipment requires competence in virtually all engineering disciplines, where the conversion of geometry into pixels is but one of these. Nevertheless, this single step in the photomask drawing process has a major impact on the throughput and quality of a photomask writer.</p><p>Current high-end semiconductor writers from Micronic use a cluster of Field-Programmable Gate Array circuits (FPGA). FPGAs have for many years been able to replace Application Specific Integrated Circuits due to their flexibility and low initial development cost. For parallel computation, an FPGA can achieve throughput not possible with microprocessors alone. Nevertheless, high-performance FPGAs are expensive devices, and upgrading from one generation to the next often requires a major redesign.</p><p>During the last decade, the computer games industry has taken the lead in parallel computation with graphics card for 3D gaming. While essentially being designed to render 3D polygons and lacking the flexibility of an FPGA, graphics cards have nevertheless started to rival FPGAs as the main workhorse of many parallel computing applications.</p><p>This thesis covers an investigation on utilizing graphics cards for the task of rendering geometry into photomask patterns. It describes different strategies that were tried and the throughput and fidelity achieved with them, along with the problems encountered. It also describes the development of a suitable evaluation framework that was critical to the process.</p>

<p>Vizz3D is a graph visualization tool developed at Växjö University. It is used to visualize different aspects of software systems in 3D, based on the static analysis of source code. It can optionally use Java3D or OpenGL as a graphics library.</p><p>In order to visualize huge 3D structures performance is very important. This comes from the fact that the structures must be redrawn with no delay when a user interacts with the system. If there were a delay the user would loose the cognitive orientation because his interaction and the feedback would not fit. Vizz3D was not capable to run huge visualizations fast enough, and therefore careful optimisation was essential. Additionally, the Vizz3D tool is just at the beginning of its software life cycle.</p><p>For optimisation, JOGL (Java Bindings for OpenGL) was chosen. The extension with a JOGL version was necessary since the GL4Java (OpenGL for Java) wrapper used for the implementation of Vizz3D is no longer supported. JOGL was therefore needed for assuring future maintainability.</p><p>The JOGL version of Vizz3D was optimised to be able to visualize huge graphs with acceptable performance. To determine what areas of Vizz3D that consumed most of its resources, the process of profiling were used. The system performance was improved according to several aspects: Computational performance, Scalability, Perceived performance, RAM footprint and Start-up time. The results were then evaluated by using benchmarking techniques. After optimisation, the performance of Vizz3D was improved a lot which led to that huge graphs now could be visualized with acceptable performance.</p>

Στα πλαίσια αυτής της διπλωματικής αναπτύχθηκε ένα σύνολο συναρτήσεων και κλάσεων το οποίο αποσκοπεί στην διευκόλυνση της συγγραφής προγραμμάτων τρισδιάστατων γραφικών. Σκοπός είναι η δημιουργία ενός API το οποίο να μην απαιτεί από τον χρήστη – προγραμματιστή βαθειά γνώση των τρισδιάστατων γραφικών αλλά μόνο ορισμένες θεμελιώδεις έννοιες και μια επιφανειακή γνώση του OpenGL προκειμένου να στήσει και να σχεδιάσει μια τρισδιάστατη σκηνή γρήγορα και εύκολα. Παράλληλα μπορεί να φανεί χρήσιμο εργαλείο και στον έμπειρο προγραμματιστή ο οποίος χρειάζεται ένα περιβάλλον που να τον απαλλάσσει από τετριμμένες και επαναλαμβανόμενες διαδικασίες που αποτελούν τροχοπέδη στην μελέτη και ανάπτυξη νέων αλγορίθμων και τεχνικών. Όλα αυτά έχουν γίνει με κύριο γνώμονα την αποδοτική σχεδίαση και την απόρριψη μη ορατής γεωμετρίας έτσι ώστε να είναι δυνατή η σχεδίαση πολυπλοκότερων σκηνών. / -

The purpose of this thesis is to find ways to make the extent and constant movement in the blogosphere visible. An application has been developed using C# and OpenGL. The application is an interactive screensaver to be run on the Windows platform. It visualizes data combining 3D and 2D elements. Geographical data is rendered using a model of the Earth, where the blog posts are constantly updated. Various statistics are displayed to give information on the current state of the blogosphere.