Parallel pipelined merge engines
US6753878B1 · kind B1 · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Mar 8, 1999 |
| Grant date | Jun 22, 2004 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Mar 8, 2019 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG06T2210/52
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
An image generator is organized into a plurality of rendering engines, each of which renders an image of a part scene and provides the part image to a merge engine associated with that rendering engine. The image is a part image in that it usually contains less than all of the objects in the image to be rendered. The merge engine merges the part image from its associated rendering engine with the part image provided by a prior merge engine and provides the merged part image to a next merge engine. One or more merge engines are designated the output merge engines and these output merge engines output a merged part image that is (a portion of) the ultimate output of the image generator, the full rendered image. Each merge engine performs its merge process on the pixels it has from its rendering engine and from its prior neighbor merge engine, in a pipelined manner and without necessarily waiting for all of the pixels of the part image or the merged part image.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.