DD&T Digital Design & Technology Gesellschaft für Hard- und  Software Entwicklung mbH  Electrical Engineering & IT Design Services

Volume rendering is a technique for visualizing 3D datasets, delivered by CT- and MRI scanners for example. The display of such data in real-time requires very high computing power and memory bandwidth not available with standard 3D graphics hardware. The VolumePro architecture is the first commercially available, PC based graphics card specialized on volume graphics. It is capable of rendering datasets of 256^3 elements (Voxels) with 30 frames per second - which equals a sustained throughput of 500 MBytes per second).

The image on the right shows the volume rendering of a lobster, performed by a behavioral simulation of the vg500 ASIC. The lobster's shell was classified semi-transparent, so you can also see the meat of the lobster.

DD&T's task during development of the vg500 ASIC was the specification of the shading stage (Phong model) inside the rendering pipeline. The shading stage is very compact - so 4 parallel rendering pipelines are implemented on the vg500 ASIC - while fast enough to allow the vg500 to run at 125 MHz. The vg500 ASIC was manufactured in a 0.35 µm technology and contains 3.2 million logic transistors and 2 Mbits of on chip SRAM.