The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document.
The patent badge is an abbreviated version of the USPTO patent document. The patent badge covers the following: Patent number, Date patent was issued, Date patent was filed, Title of the patent, Applicant, Inventor, Assignee, Attorney firm, Primary examiner, Assistant examiner, CPCs, and Abstract. The patent badge does contain a link to the full patent document (in Adobe Acrobat format, aka pdf). To download or print any patent click here.
Patent No.:
Date of Patent:
Oct. 21, 1997
Filed:
Aug. 11, 1992
Leonard A Lehman, Redwood City, CA (US);
George W Lambidakis, Aptos, CA (US);
Radius Inc., Sunnyvale, CA (US);
Abstract
A method and apparatus for controlling the display of graphics data, in which the data are compressed for dense storage in a graphics memory. The densely packed data can be asynchronously read from the memory and reformatted into a format suitable for driving a conventional display device. The memory comprises an array of memory locations, each location having capacity to store a first number of bits. The apparatus includes a graphics controller capable of densely packing compressed data words into the memory locations, where each compressed word comprises a second number of bits corresponding to a pixel. The graphics controller can densely pack the compressed words in the sense that it can write both a first word and a first portion of a second word into one memory location, and a second portion of the second word (with at least a portion of a third word) in a second memory location. In preferred embodiments, the apparatus of the invention receives 32-bit video data (with corresponding host addresses) and compresses each 32-bit word into a 24-bit pixel for dense packing in a video memory having 32-bit memory locations.