FPGA-based floating-point datapath design for geometry processing

Geometry processing comprises of a great many computationally intensive floating-point operations. Real-time graphics systems generally use application-specific custom designed parallel hardware to provide the high performance computation power. When designing a graphics engine on a FPGA-based configurable computing system, cost-effectiveness is important. This paper investigates and proposes a cost-effective FPGA-based floating-point datapath for geometry process. It is designed to be a basic building block for FPGA-based geometry processors. The implemented datapath operates at a frequency of 6.25 Mhz and has an average floating-point operation time of 10.2 microseconds.