Japanese fabless firm launches graphics chip

LONDON — A Japanese fabless semiconductor company, Digital Media Professionals Inc., has launched a graphics processor called the Ultray 2000. Originally shown at the Siggraph computer graphics exhibition in Los Angeles the chip was expected to become available for sale in the fall of 2005.

The chip is intended to allow the generation and rendering of three-dimensional graphics and has been made for the company by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. using a 0.13-micron CMOS manufacturing process, DMP said in a statement.

The Ultray 2000 copes with image sizes of up to 1280 pixels by 1024 pixels and supports in hardware an algorithm that generates physical light reflections and shadow properties for various materials. It is also able to create a hairy surface, the company said.

The chip operates at up to a clock frequency of 200-MHz with a DDR memory interface that is able to send data at a clock frequency of up to 400-MHz.

“Taking into the account the authoring side of the equation, it is impractical to introduce brand new graphics architecture. DMP's approach is to add new rendering scheme such as BRDF and gaseous object renderer on top on the de facto standard architecture to enable the next level of graphics computing,” said Tatsuo Yamamoto, president and chief executive officer of DMP, in a statement. BRDF stands for Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function.