ORGFX : a Wishbone compatible Graphics Accelerator for the OpenRISC processor

Abstract: Modern embedded systems such as cellphones or medical instrumentation use increasingly complex graph-ical interfaces. Currently there are no widely used open hardware solutions to accelerate embedded graphicalapplications. This thesis presents the ORSoC graphics accelerator (ORGFX), an open hardware graphics ac-celerator that can be used with programmable hardware. A standalone software implementation is providedto help for a quick development of accelerated applications.The accelerator is able to render 2D, 3D and vector graphics. The example implementation of theORGFX is integrated with the OpenRISC Reference Platform System on Chip version 2 (ORPSoCv2). Thenal implementation runs on a Xilinx FPGA at 50 MHz, and provides accelerated graphics output froman HDMI port. An extensive software driver and a set of utilities to ease development for the graphicsaccelerator are provided along with the hardware. The software implementation of the accelerator uses thesame API as the hardware drivers, making it possible to quickly develop applications for the acceleratorwithout access to a physical platform.The nal implementation trades performance against platform independence and generality. The com-ponent can be integrated with any CPU or memory chip and works alongside a custom display core thatrenders the output to an external screen. The software drivers can be run bare metal or modied to run onan operating system.All of the hardware and software developed in this project is provided as open source under the GNULesser General Public License (LGPL), and can be downloaded from www.opencores.com. The authorshope that future releases will be integrated as a standard component into the OpenRISC Reference PlatformSystem on Chip.