A design of transcendental function arithmetic unit for lighting operation of mobile 3D graphic processor

모바일 3차원 그래픽 프로세서의 조명처리 연산을 위한 초월함수 연산기 구현

Mobile devices is getting to include more functions according to the demand of digital convergence. Applications based on 3D graphic calculation such as 3D games and navigation are one of the functions. 3D graphic calculation requires heavy calculation. Therefore, we need dedicated 3D graphic hardware unit with high performance. 3D graphic calculation needs a lot of complicated floating-point arithmetic operation. However, most of current mobile 3D graphics processors do not have efficient architecture for mobile devices because they are based on those for conventional computer systems. In this paper, we propose arithmetic units for special functions of lighting operation of 3D graphics. Transcendental arithmetic units are designed using approximation of logarithm function. Special function units for lighting operation such as reciprocal, square root, reciprocal of square root, and power can be obtained. The proposed arithmetic unit has lower error rate and smaller silicon area than conventional arithmetic architecture.