An approach to the design of hardware curve generators for graphic displays

In many computer graphics applications special purpose hardware devices to generate curve families are more and more convenient to use because of ever growing performance graphic tools are requested for. In this paper an approach to the design of fast hardware curve generators is proposed, mainly based on the use of vector generators in the integration of particular functions and of stored tables. By means of this approach a precision as high as needed can be achieved, while the final point and a selected subset of intermediate points are always reached with an error as low as half a pixel at most; output rate is very close to the speed of available vector generators. Our method was applied to circle generation, and error figures as good as in other known methods were obtained. For radius values ranging up to some thousands of pixels, single-chip implementation results feasible. The method is easily extensible to three-dimensional curve genera- tion.