Development of a Hardware Accelerator for Generation of Korean Character

한글 문자의 생성을 위한 하드웨어 가속기 개발

In this paper, we propose a graphic system for high speed generation of bitmap font data from the outline font data such as PostScript, etc. In desk-top publishing system. A VLSI chip called KAFOG was designed for the high-speed calculation of a cubic Bezier curve, which was implemented in 1.5\ulcorner CMOS gate array using 17,000 gates. A cubic Bezier curve is approximated by a set of line segments in KAFOG at the throughput of 250K curves per second with the clock frequency of 40 MHz. A prototype graphic system was developed using two MC6800 microprocessors and the KAFOG chip. Two microprocessors cooperate in a master and slave mode, and handshaking is used for communication between two processors. KAFOG chip, being controlled by the slave processor, operates as a coprocessor for the calculation of the outline font. The throughput of the prototype graphic system is 40 64$\times$64 outline fonts per sencond.