Simulation of hardware support for OpenGL graphics architecture

The growing number of applications for 3D graphics and imaging systems in the mass market requires the customized approach to the design of high-performance 3D graphics and imaging system architectures. That fact coupled with the strong trends to industrial standardization of graphics API, such as OpenGL, leads to enhanced portability for imaging and graphics applications. The progress on the hardware support of API functionality gives a real possibility to use a top-down approach in the design of custom graphics/imaging systems based on the mixed hardware/software implementation of the OpenGL architecture. Software simulation is a relatively cheap and fast way for initial graphics architecture template development and evaluation to acquire the structure and parameters that can be used later for HDL elaboration and simulation. This paper discusses a 3D graphics and imaging system architecture model implementation based on OpenGL API hardware support simulation. The object-oriented approach has been used for this development of analytic and software models simulating hardware units on different stages of the graphics pipeline. The Interactive Imaging System Architecture Composer has been developed in this project for fast run-time simulation management, data acquisition and interpretation. The expandable set of architecture templates uses a reconfigurable shared library of "virtual hardware units" simulating the different hardware structures for graphics and image processing.