William R. Hancock

Extending AMLCD technology into the Space Shuttle cockpit

A challenging and exciting program is underway to develop an active matrix liquid crystal display for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration--Rockwell Space Shuttle cockpit upgrade. The Multifunction Electronic Display Subsystem program greatly enhances operational capabilities of the Space Shuttle and improves overall system reliability, replacing multiple electromechanical and obsolete cathode ray tubes with 11 flat-panel displays.

Meeting the graphical needs of the electronic battlefield

This paper describes the top level architecture and requirements of the resulting Cockpit Display Generator (CDG). The architecture provides the graphical and video processing power needed to drive future high resolution display devices and generate more natural panoramic 3D formats. The CDG will provide multichannel, high performance 2D and 3D graphics, and real-time video manipulation. The architecture is designed for a compact implementation in the PAVE PILLAR environment using high-speed fiber optic networks. The CDG sustains the needs of the Panoramic Cockpit Control and Display System 2000 cockpit; it can be extensible to higher performance levels in PAVE PACE architectures.

Simulated breadboard: single-card real-time 3D rendering engine

A key challenge to tomorrows real-time 3D rendering engine has been the memory bandwidth barrier that limits how fast an image can be painted onto image memory. Another has been the floating point throughput that limits how much world coordinate data can be mapped to the screen.