Title: PGC: a pattern-based graphics controller

Authors: Tassadaq Hussain; Amna Haider

Addresses: BSC-Microsoft Research Centre, Nexus I Building, Office 303, Campus Nord UPC, Gran Capita 2-4, 08034 Barcelona, Spain ' Unal Center of Education Research and Development, Caya Goya 23 1-2, 08903 Barcelona, Spain

Abstract: In last decade graphics system have shown a great impact in our lives not only as a commodity itself but also for specialised use. Various powerful and expensive platforms to support graphical applications appeared in recent years. All these platforms require a high performance core that manages and schedules the high speed data of graphics peripherals. In this article, we design and propose a pattern-based graphics controller (PGC) that handles graphics peripherals efficiently. The proposed system is highly reliable in terms of cost, performance and power. The PGC-based system is implemented and tested on a Xilinx ML505 FPGA board. When compared with the baseline systems, the results show that the PGC captures video at 2.5×, 1.78× and 5× of higher frame rate and achieves 1.8× to 14.6× of speedup while executing different image processing applications. PGC consumes 16% to 28% of less on-chip power than the baseline systems.

Keywords: field programmable gate arrays; FPGA; memory control; high performance computing; PGC; pattern-based graphics controller; controller design.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCAD.2014.060705

International Journal of Circuits and Architecture Design, 2014 Vol.1 No.2, pp.117 - 140

Received: 24 Sep 2013
Accepted: 06 Feb 2014
Published online: 21 Jun 2014 *

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