SRC Technical Note 1998-013
SRC Technical Note 1998-013Foreword
Since the mid-1980's, the field of 3D computer graphics has enjoyed tremendous growth, but outside of academia much of the work has remained largely unpublished. Highly competitive pressures seem to have created an environment in which companies are reluctant to publish design details of their work, fearing (perhaps justifiably) that exposing their proprietary technology might erode some competitive advantage. This environment may have benefited individual companies, but the community as a whole now suffers from the scarcity of published work.
At the 1998 Eurographics/SIGGRAPH Workshop on Graphics Hardware, the paper "Neon: A Single-Chip 3D Workstation Graphics Accelerator" won praise from reviewers with comments such as: "This work should be seen by the community. We don't get enough papers describing the choices behind a significant project involving tens of man years" and "While most of the ideas described in this paper are not new, many of the ideas are not previously documented."
Neon borrowed architectural features from 3D accelerators developed at Digital Equipment Corporation's MIPS-based workstation product engineering group in Palo Alto. Formed in the mid to late 1980s, the group had close ties with the company's research labs in Palo Alto; indeed, several of the group's founding members came directly from those research labs.
The PixelStamp project, begun in the late 1980s, was the group's first generation of 3D graphics accelerators. The PixelVision project, begun in the early 1990s, was the group's second generation of 3D graphics accelerators. In 1992 most of the Palo Alto workstation group was disbanded, though the PixelVision project was continued.
The ideas behind Neon's triangle setup and rasterization were borrowed from the PixelVision project. The PixelVision architecture was documented in a 1992 manual by Brian Kelleher which was classified as company confidential. We are now declassifying and making "PixelVision Architecture" publicly available to better acknowledge the source of ideas used in Neon.
The author, Brian Kelleher, currently serves as Vice President of US Research and Development at 3Dlabs. Brian has more than 15 years of management and engineering experience designing 3D graphics products, during which time he is credited with 7 design patents. He was one of six founders of Dynamic Pictures, which was acquired by 3Dlabs in July 1998, and provided the leadership and vision for the company's new product development. Prior to starting Dynamic Pictures, Brian was the head graphics designer for Digital Equipment Corporation's MIPS-based development team on the West Coast of the United States in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Brian served as Dynamic Pictures' CEO from November 1993 when the company was founded until October 1997, at which point he became the Executive Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer.
Bob McNamara
October 15, 1998
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