Abstract

This paper describes the design of an optoelectronic graphics display processor. The processor has the advantages of simplicity and extremely high-speed generation of computer graphic images. It achieves its speed by processing all the pixels of an image in parallel. It operates by accumulating polygons, the primitive shapes of which ail objects in the scene are composed. A front-end processor, not part of this system, is responsible for generating the coordinates and color or gray shade of each polygon and passing that information to the processor described in this paper. The processor has the capability of generating all the pixels of any arbitrary polygon in constant time. It accumulates all the polygons in a scene in a frame buffer, and when the frame buffer contains a complete image, it is available for display.

© 1995 Optical Society of America