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. 12, 2004
Filed:
May. 18, 2001
Nandini Ramani, Saratoga, CA (US);
David C. Kehlet, Los Altos, CA (US);
Ewa M. Kubalska, San Jose, CA (US);
Michael G. Lavelle, Saratoga, CA (US);
Michael A. Wasserman, Redwood City, CA (US);
Kevin Tang, Union City, CA (US);
Yan Yan Tang, Mountain View, CA (US);
Sun Microsystems, Inc., Santa Clara, CA (US);
Abstract
A system and method for rasterizing and rendering graphics data is disclosed. Vertices may be grouped to form primitives such as triangles, which are rasterized using two-dimensional arrays of samples bins. Individual samples may be selected from the bins according to different criteria such as memory bank allocation to improve utilization of the system's rendering pipeline. Since the arrays may have more bins than the number of evaluation units in the rendering pipeline, the samples from the bins may be stored to FIFO memories to allow invalid or empty samples (those outside the primitive being rendered) to be removed. The samples may then be filtered to form pixels that are displayable to form an image on a display device.