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Comp 290 is a graduate-level "topics" course used for one-time offerings or emerging topics. This particular Comp 290 is an advanced seminar on graphics hardware. However, the focus is less on using current commodity GPU's (i.e. NVIDIA/ATI cards) and more on exploring research ideas for "next-generation" graphics hardware. We'll be reading a lot of papers, with our interests driving the specific topics covered. We will also implement circuits on Xilinx FPGA's as part of a course project. That is, we don't want to just talk about new directions for graphics hardware. We want to explore feasibility and performance by actually building something that works. Class assignments appear below. Click the links for more information.

Verilog Assignment 1:  VGA Controller
Implement a simple VGA controller on the XSA-100 Spartan-II FPGA Prototyping Board. Specifically, write Verilog modules to generate hsync, vsync, horizontal count, vertical count, and active video signal. Then, write a higher-level module that uses these to output an RGB test pattern on the VGA port. The purpose of this assignment is to become familiar with the various development tools and to start building infrastructure for the final project.

Verilog Assignment 2:  SDRAM Controller
Implement an SDRAM controller to interface with memory on the XSA-100 Spartan-II FPGA Prototyping Board. Then, place a frame buffer in memory and modify your VGA controller to read from the frame buffer during scan out. The purpose of this assignment is to become familiar with the complexities and idiosyncrasies of SDRAM and to continue to build infrastructure for the final project.

Final Project:  Next-Generation Graphics HW Architecture
For the final project, I worked with Eric Bennett and Leonard McMillan to investigate a new architecture for graphics hardware. The idea was to design a system that allows "all possible views" to be extracted from a single traversal of a scene description. This project later became a Graphics Hardware paper.