Honeywell G.m.b.h.

Keith L Jackson

Douglas A Fischer

Douglas E Thorpe

Glenn M Courtright

Bradley D Peterson

A polygon tiling engine for use in a computer graphics display system. The computer graphics display system includes a high speed processor which provides lines of vertices, object type codes and START and STOP points for the vertex lines. The system further includes a VME bus. An improved apparatus for polygon tiling comprises apparatus for receiving the START and STOP points, instruction register apparatus coupled to the high speed processor for receiving instruction codes, object storing apparatus, a state machine for controlling the polygon tiling apparatus, a polygon address generating machine, a user defined object memory, a multiplexer and a triple buffered memory. Information is sent from the high speed processor to the tripled buffered memory, instruction registers and START and STOP registers. The information is processed into polygon addresses by the polygon generating apparatus. The polygon tiling apparatus is capable of tiling terrain data, multivertex polygons and user defined objects. The user defined objects are preferably stored in a link list random access memory. The state machine controls the polygon address generator and receives instructions from the instruction register. User information is supplied on the VME bus. Tiled polygons are output to a polygon sort engine for further processing.

Polygon tiling engine

A polygon sort engine including first and second apparatus for sorting. The first apparatus for sorting receives planar, externally convex polygon vertices from an external polygon tiling engine. This includes points and lines. The state machine on the second apparatus for sorting interfaces with the polygon tiling engine and a raster engine in a graphics pipeline. It provides a control signal which determines when the first apparatus for sorting will receive the next polygon. The second sorting appartus also controls whether the polygon is stored in the PING or PONG memory. For example, as the state machine is controlling the sorting of the current polygon into the PING RAM, the state machine will also be controlling the loading of the previous vertices and the PONG RAM into the raster engine.

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Albuquerque, NM, United States of America

Keith L Jackson