This thesis describes the design and implementation of a full-color display board, Cx consisting of 24-bit per pixel frame buffer(8 bits for Red, Green, and Blue, respectively) and the required controller/interface for the VME bus. The current board architecture supports raster graphics system with the screen resolution of 1024 by 768. To achieve a screen refresh rate of 60 frames per second, the board with the above resolution requires an average access rate of approximately 15 nanoseconds(66 MHz) per pixel.
The board consists of several main block; an interface to the Sun 4 workstation system, video system controller(VSC), a frame buffer, and video output circuitry which includes color look-up tables. The interface to the Sun 4 workstation is accomplished through VME bus which is the I/O bus of the Sun 4. TMS34061 VSC is used to control frame buffer memory and to generate CRT control signals such as HSYNC, VSYNC, and BLANK. The frame buffer consists of 24 256K×4 bit video RAMs(KM424C256), with its total size of $24\times10^6$ bits. Three RAMDACs(KDA0478) were used for generating final analog video signals, each of which is responsible for the red, green, and blue color, respectively.
To support user application programs, we also developed a device driver for the display board, which was written in C language.
