Ghostscript : Cobalt Acceleration Library

Adaptive Acceleration Technology

Cobalt Acceleration Library - Next Generation Embedded Print Solution

Cobalt Acceleration Library (CAL) is an embedded solution by Artifex designed to deliver significant performance enhancements to the embedded printer and MFP markets. Engineered from 25 years of PDF/PS/ PCL/XPS expertise, CAL delivers superior speed and quality.

Our innovative high-performance embedded solution leverages emerging technologies for a faster, smarter, leaner print engine. CAL utilizes a range of optimizations to improve printing performance, including smart alogrithms, parallelism, and SIMD.

Supports RGB, CMYK, 1 bpc, 2 bpc, 4bpc, 8 bpc and custom bpc, pixel interleaved or planar color components.
Page size up to 16m pixels/lines (177m at 1200dpi/48dpmm). Very high resolution devices supported >4800dpi.
Full page buffers or band buffers (display list) rendering supported.
Display list can be in RAM or on a hard disk.
Display list supports color/monochrome page detection, collated copies, flexible page print order (reverse, even/odd, selective ranges).
Includes high performance LuraTech JBIG2 and JPEG 2000 (JPX) decode filters for PDF.
Skew detection/correction libraries optimized to run in a few milliseconds with minimal loss of quality.
Direct PDF print.

Key Benefits & Performance Improvements

Artifex has identified critical performance areas of PDL processing to optimize: halftone screening, scaling, rotation, transparency blending, and color conversion. We have seen significant benefits from reimplementing these algorithms using SIMD instructions. The new implementation results in notable increases for industry standard PDL test files as well as PDF tests needed for AirPrint conformance.

CAL is portable and will run on minimal real-time operating systems, embedded Linux, UNIX, Window and OS X. CAL has its own memory manager for high-performance memory operations on systems without dedicated hardware to support memory.

Additional Key Benefits

Skew Detection & Correction

For MFPs and Scanner solutions CAL brings high performance skew detection and correction with speeds of over 50 pages per minute on low powered CPUs. The current implementation is optimized with SSE instructions.

Printing Architectures

The CAL engine can produce output for a wide variety of printing architectures. Support for CMYK and RGB using 1, 2, 4, 8 and custom bits per component with interleaved or planar format. High resolution greater than 4800 dpi is possible.

The Display List

The CAL display list can be stored in RAM or on a hard drive. It supports collated copies, imposition, flexible page print order, automatic greyscale/color detection and ink saving. The display list and band buffers in CAL result in significant RAM saving, but CAL RIP is also capable of full-page rendering which is faster at the expense of using more memory.

Multi-Threading

Using the display list allows CAL to leverage multiple threads in support of parallel processing. The parsing and rendering of the page can be overlapped and parts of the display list can be dispatched to multiple cores to be processed in parallel.

ICC Based Color Management

CAL supports a wide array of halftone solutions easily realized using the optimized engine. Threshold-based techniques, as well as error diffusion, are available. Graphical objects, text, images, and vectors, can be distinguished and given distinct color and halftone treatment.

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