Due to the increasing demand of three-dimensional (3D) graphic applications in various consumer electronics, how to develop a low-cost 3D graphic hardware accelerator suitable for the embedded systems has become an important issue. A typical 3D graphic accelerator includes a geometry sub-system and a rendering sub-system. In this thesis a highly-efficient 3D graphic rendering intellectual property (IP) based on the tiled-based approach is proposed. An entire rendering IP consists of several modules. The main contributions of this thesis focus on the development of the setup-engine, rasterization module, and the integration of the whole modules for the rendering IP. In the design of setup engine, the thesis develops a folded arithmetic unit architecture mainly consisting of one iterative divider, three multipliers and several adders, which can finish the overall computation of the setup equations within less than 50 cycles. As for the rasterization module, this thesis develops several scan-conversion algorithms including hierarchical, fast skip, and boundary-edge test methods suitable for the tiled-based rendering process. The ordinary line drawing algorithm for the scan-line boundary search or the direct in-out test approach is not efficient for tile-based approach since the shape of triangle primitives may become irregular after tiling. Our experimental results show that the boundary-edge test can lead to the most compact design since it can transform the normal in-out test circuit for single pixel to detect two end-points of the scan-line simultaneously. In addition, the rasterization module can be divided into the scan-line and the fragment generation parts which can help the optimization and speedup of the individual part to achieve the desired overall fill-rate goal. Our simulation shows the fill-rate improvement based on this approach is around 60%. Finally, this thesis integrates all the sub-modules to the entire rendering IP core. This IP has been realized by 0.18 um technology. The total gate count is 504k. It can run up to 166 Mhz, and deliver the peak fill rate of 333M pixels/sec and 1.3G texels/sec. This IP has been highly verified, and achieves more than 95% code coverage. It has also been integrated with OPENGL ES software module, Linux operation system and geometry module, and successfully prototyped on the ARM versatile platform.

A modular and area-efficient 3D graphics accelerator for tile based rendering in FPGA systems has been designed and implemented. The accelerator supports a subset of OpenGL, with features such as mipmapping, multitexturing and blending. The accelerator consists of a software component for projection and clipping of triangles, as well as a hardware component for rasterization, coloring and video output. Trade-offs made between area, performance and functionality have been described and justified. In order to evaluate the functionality and performance of the accelerator, it has been tested with two different applications. / En modulär och utrymmeseffektiv 3D-grafikaccelerator för tile-baserad rendering i FPGA-system har designats och implementerats. Acceleratorn stöder en delmängd av OpenGL med funktioner som mipmapping, multitexturering och blending. Acceleratorn är uppdelad i en mjukvarudel för projektion och klippning av trianglar och en hårdvarudel för rastrering, färgsättning och utritning till skärm. Avvägningar som gjorts mellan area, prestanda och funktionalitet har beskrivits och motiverats. För att evaulera funktionalitet och prestanda har acceleratorn testats med två olika applikationer.