An Advanced 3D Frame Buffer Memory Controller

Abstract

This paper details the design o f an advanced 32 bit 3D frame buffer memory controller for a 3D Graphics Raster Processor called TAYRA [1]. This memory controller is designed to provide a performance o f 33 MPixelsls for read and write cycles, 4 GPixelsls for block write, and 16.5 MPixelsls for read, modify, write cycles (with a pixel size o f 4 bytes). This performance is without any interleaving. It has several control modes: S3 shared frame buffer protocol compatibility [2], stand alone 3D buffers, multiplexed 2DI3D buffers, and others. Further, our 3D memory controller is designed to control DRAM, VRAM and WRAM, and EDO versions of these memories. Also, we support up to 4 screen buffers, 16 MBytes o f screen memory, and many combinations o f memory organisationsup to 1600x1280.