Memory and Processing Architecture for 3D Voxel-Based Imagery

We are introducing aversatilevoxel-based architecture for 3D volumevisualization, called the Cubearchitecture. A small-scale prototype of the architecture has been realized in hardware and has been operating in true real time, faster than the alternative voxel systems. The Cube architecture is centered around a 3D cubic frame buffer of voxels, and it entertains three processors which access the frame buffer to input sampled and synthetic data, to manipulate, and to project and render the 3D images. To.cope with the huge quantity of voxels and still perform in real time, two special features were incorporated within the architecture: a unique skewed memory organization, which permits the retrieval and storage of voxels in parallel, and a multiple-write bus, which speeds up the viewing process. These features allow Cube, for example, to project an image of n³ voxels in O (n²logn) time rather than the conventional O(n³)time.