Development of High-performance Sprite Drawing Process in a Game Library for High-Level Synthesis

A mobile terminal dynamically reconfiguring an optimal hardware for each application can achieve higher performance and lower power consumption. To develop game applications running on such mobile terminal requires a high-level synthesizable game library whose functions can be automatically converted to hardware modules. Each function in a high-level synthesizable library, must be written considering characteristic of hardware to be converted to an efficient hardware. This paper focuses on the drawing of 2D sprite characters which is a common function among many conventional software game libraries. Sprite movement is realized by drawing and compositing with a background image. To achieve this, we develop a software description suitable for high-level synthesis while taking into hardware characteristics. The characteristics considered are the burst transfer of memory access and the parallelization of the former and later processes. Experimental results show that our high-level synthesis hardware is 1.6 times faster and sixteen times more power efficient than software execution.