A Ray-Casting Accelerator in 10nm CMOS for Efficient 3D Scene Reconstruction in Edge Robotics and Augmented Reality Applications

A ray-casting accelerator in 10nm CMOS simultaneously casts multiple rays in spatial proximity to exploit voxel data-locality, featuring a near-memory search for voxel address overlaps and opportunistic approximate trilinear interpolation for energy savings. Measurements demonstrate ray-casting of 320×240 depth images with an average latency of 23.2ms/frame, while consuming 32.7pJ energy per ray-step and achieving a maximum energy-efficiency of 115.3 giga raysteps/W.