Real-time Ray-tracing Chip Architecture
Hyung-Min Yoon, Byoung-Ok Lee, Cheol-Ho Cheong, Jin-Suk Hur, Sang-Gon Kim, Woonam Chung, Yong‐ho Lee, Woo-Chan Park · IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing · 2015
In this paper, we describe the world’s first real-time ray-tracing chip architecture. Raytracing technology generates high-quality 3D graphics images better than current rasterization technology by providing four essential light effects: shadow, reflection, refraction and transmission. The real-time ray-tracing chip named RayChip includes a real-time ray-tracing graphics processing unit and an accelerating tree-building unit. An ARM Ltd. central processing unit (CPU) and other peripherals are also included to support all processes of 3D graphics applications. Using the accelerating tree-building unit named RayTree to minimize the CPU load, the chip uses a low-end CPU and decreases both silicon area and power consumption. The evaluation results with RayChip show appropriate performance to support real-time ray tracing in high-definition (HD) resolution, while the rendered images are scaled to full HD resolution. The chip also integrates the Linux operating system and the familiar OpenGL for Embedded Systems application programming interface for easy application development.