Developing the next generation cockpit display system

The goal of advanced cockpit display systems is to present large amounts of information quickly and in an understandable format, enabling the aviator to improve mission performance. Current front-line cockpit display systems utilize low-resolution analog video to present two-dimensional (2-D) images on many separate displays. The future cockpit will be capable of integrating large picture digital video with three-dimensional (3-D) and 2-D color images. This system will be capable of rendering icons, maps, and world-views. It will be compatible with head mounted displays and multiple large displays to improve war-planning and combat aviator situational awareness. We are developing a massively parallel 3-D renderer which will be capable of updating 500,000 3-D triangles per second with shading, lighting, transparency, texture mapping, and hidden surface removal. The renderer design employs a massively parallel architecture with 1,024 ALUs per chip to display one million anti-aliased vectors per second. Current high end workstations are capable of these display goals, but fall far short of military reliability, size, and power requirements. The rendering system will be small enough to fit on one board, extensible to dual-seat configuration, and capable of up to eight windows per display channel.