HARDWARE ACCELERATOR FOR OUTLINE FONT GENERATION

Abstract

Translation of the scalable outline font data as represented by a set of control points of the cubic Bezier curve, etc. into the bitmap data for desk-top publishing (DTP) applications requires a significant amount of computation. In this paper, we propose a special purpose chip called KAFOG for the high-speed generation of bitmap font from the Hangul PostScript file for screen display as well as LBP (Laser Beam Printer) output. KAFOG chip was implemented in 1.5-mu-m CMOS gate array using 17 K gates. The computation throughput of the KAFOG chip is 250 K cubic Bezier curve segments (each curve segment is composed of four control points) per second at the clock frequency of 40 MHz.