Power Operation Accelerator to speed up lighting in 3D graphics

This paper presents a design of special hardware developed for enhancing the floating-point power operations which are actively used at the lighting stage to calculate the specular term in 3D graphics geometry engines. The power operation takes just 4 cycles in our floating-point multiplier while it takes about 100-200 cycles in conventional floating-point units. Although an approximation algorithm is employed in the power operation to reduce the hardware complexity required, the error of power value from the developed floatingpoint multiplier is so minimal that no difference can be found by human eyes.