Scanline-based rendering of 2D vector graphics

Abstract

External memory access exacts considerable timing and energy burdens from portable devices. However, most hardware accelerators for rendering two-dimensional (2D) vector graphics draw images in a path-based (path-by-path) manner, which frequently causes excessive external memory traffic. This paper proposes a scanline-based method for rendering 2D vector graphics in portable devices. The proposed method processes all paths spanning a scanline at a time, enabling the use of a scanline-sized internal frame buffer (FB). Using the internal FB, the accelerator can avoid repeated accesses to the external FB and reduce external memory access considerably for images in which many objects overlap with one another.