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

Special devices to generate curves are more and more convenient 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 and of stored tables. The needed precision can be achieved, while the final point and a selected subset of intermediate points are reached with an error of half a pixel at most; output rate is very close to available vector generators rate. Our method was applied to circle generation: for radius values up to some thousands of pixels, single-chip implementation results feasible. The method is easily extensible to three-dimensional curves.