The Design of a 2D Graphics Accelerator for Embedded Systems

Abstract

Recently, advances in technology have enabled embedded systems to be adopted for a variety of applications. Some of these applications require real-time 2D graphics processing running on limited design specifications such as low power consumption and a small area. In order to satisfy such conditions, including a specific 2D graphics accelerator in the embedded system is an effective method. This method reduces the workload of the processor in the embedded system by exploiting the accelerator. The accelerator assists the system to perform 2D graphics processing in real-time. Therefore, a variety of applications that require 2D graphics processing can be implemented with an embedded processor. In this paper, we present a 2D graphics accelerator for tiny embedded systems. The accelerator includes an optimized line-drawing operation based on Bresenham’s algorithm. The optimized operation enables the accelerator to deal with various kinds of 2D graphics processing and to perform the line-drawing instead of the system processor. Moreover, the accelerator also distributes the workload of the processor core by removing the need for the core to access the frame buffer memory. We measure the performance of the accelerator by implementing the processor, including the accelerator, on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA), and ascertaining the possibility of realization by synthesizing using the 180 nm CMOS process.

Keywords

• 2D graphics accelerator
• embedded system
• line-drawing
• Bresenham’s algorithm
• alpha-blending
• anti-aliasing