Patents by Inventor Mark N. Heinen

Mark N. Heinen has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 5493643
    Abstract: An image generator architecture in which tri-level fixed interleave processing provides medium grain parallelism for polygon, tiling, and pixel operations. Input data at each stage are divided into spatially distributed subsets that are interleaved among parallel processors using a fixed, precalculated mapping that minimizes correlation of local scene complexity with any one processor. The present tri-level fixed interleave processing architecture divides a processing task into a pseudo-random, fixed interleaved pattern of regions that are assigned to different processors. Each processor processes many of these randomly located regions. The assignment of processors to regions is a fixed repeating pattern. The highest level of fixed interleave processing is the allocation of fixed-size database regions (area modules) to polygon processors. The next level relates to image sub-region fixed interleave processing.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: May 3, 1994
    Date of Patent: February 20, 1996
    Assignee: Loral Aerospace Corp.
    Inventors: Brian T. Soderberg, Dale D. Miller, Douglas Pheil, Kent Cauble, Mark N. Heinen, Mark L. Kenworthy