Laser Printers

Using MIPS

Path of paper through laser

printer
The primary principle at
work in a laser printer is
static electricity. Static
electricity is simply an
electrical charge built up on
an insulated object. Since
oppositely charged atoms
are attracted to each other,
objects with opposite static
electricity fields cling
together. A laser printer
uses this phenomenon as a
sort of "temporary glue."
The core component of this
system is the
photoreceptor, typically a
revolving drum or cylinder.
This drum assembly is
made out of highly
photoconductive material
that is discharged by light
photons.

Initially, the drum is given a total positive charge by the charge

corona wire, a wire with an electrical current running through it.
As the drum revolves, the printer shines a tiny laser beam across
the surface to discharge certain points. In this way, the laser
"draws" the letters and images to be printed as a pattern of
electrical charges -- an electrostatic image. After the pattern is
set, the printer coats the drum with positively charged toner -- a
fine, black powder. Since it has a positive charge, the toner clings
to the negative discharged areas of the drum, but not to the
positively charged "background."

With the powder pattern affixed,

the drum rolls over a sheet of
paper, which is moving along a
belt below. Before the paper rolls
under the drum, it is given a
negative charge by the transfer
corona wire (charged roller).
This charge is stronger than the
negative charge of the
electrostatic image, so the paper
can pull the toner powder away.
Since it is moving at the same
speed as the drum, the paper
picks up the image pattern
exactly.
To keep the paper from clinging
to the drum, it is discharged by
the detac corona wire
immediately after picking up the
toner.

Finally, the printer passes the

paper through the fuser, a pair
of heated rollers. As the paper
passes through these rollers,
the loose toner powder melts,
fusing with the fibers in the
paper. The fuser rolls the paper
to the output tray, and you
have your finished page. The
fuser also heats up the paper
itself, of course, which is why
pages are always hot when
they come out of a laser
printer.
After depositing toner on the
paper, the drum surface passes
the discharge lamp. This
bright light exposes the entire
photoreceptor surface, erasing
the electrical image. The drum
surface then passes the charge
corona wire, which reapplies
the positive charge.

The Controller
Before a laser printer can do anything else, it needs to receive the
page data and figure out how it's going to put everything on the
paper. This is the job of the printer controller. The printer controller
is the laser printer's main onboard computer. It talks to the host
computer (for example, your PC) through a communications port,
such as a parallel port. At the start of the printing job, the laser
printer establishes with the host computer how they will exchange
data. The controller may have to start and stop the host computer
periodically to process the information it has received.
Printer Controller Inputs

Parallel Port
The original specification for
parallel ports was
unidirectional, meaning that
data only traveled in one
direction for each pin. With the
introduction of the PS/2 in 1987,
IBM offered a new
bidirectional parallel port
design. This mode is commonly
known as Standard Parallel
Port (SPP) and has completely
replaced the original design.
Bidirectional communication
allows each device to receive
data as well as transmit it.
Many devices use the eight pins
(2 through 9) originally
designated for data. Using the
same eight pins limits
communication to half-duplex,
meaning that information can
only travel in one direction at a
time. But pins 18 through 25,
originally just used as grounds,
can be used as data pins also.
This allows for full-duplex
(both directions at the same
time) communication.

The Controller Language

For the printer controller and the host computer to

communicate, they need to speak the same page

description language. The primary printer languages
these days are Hewlett Packard's Printer Command
Language (PCL) and Adobe's Postscript. Both of these
languages describe the page in vector form -- that is, as
mathematical values of geometric shapes, rather than as
a series of dots (a bitmap image). The printer itself takes
the vector images and converts them into a bitmap page.
With this system, the printer can receive elaborate,
complex pages, featuring any sort of font or image. Also,
since the printer creates the bitmap image itself, it can
use its maximum printer resolution.

The Controller Language - continued

Some printers use a graphical device interface

(GDI) format instead of a standard PCL. In this

system, the host computer creates the dot array
itself, so the controller doesn't have to process
anything -- it just sends the dot instructions on to the
laser. But in most laser printers, the controller must
organize all of the data it receives from the host
computer. This includes all of the commands that tell
the printer what to do -- what paper to use, how to
format the page, how to handle the font, etc. For the
controller to work with this data, it has to get it in the
right order.
In most laser printers, the controller saves all printjob data in its own memory. This lets the controller
put different printing jobs into a queue so it can work
through them one at a time. It also saves time when
printing multiple copies of a document, since the host
computer only has to send the data once.

Printer Speed
It may seem perfectly natural, when judging the
performance of a high-speed laser printer, to look at the
clock speed of the processor that's driving it. The more
megahertz, the better, right?
Not necessarily.
Clock speed - an indication of how many instructions per
second a processor can execute - as the measure of
performance in PCs. And many consider it the driving force
behind printer speed, which is the number of pages per
minute a printer can generate.

There's more to print speed than clock speed:

Is the processor RISC or CISC?
How fast does it process large graphics files and the very
long algorithms characteristic of PCL and Adobe PostScript
printer languages?
And, bottom line, how much does it cost?

CISC vs. RISC architecture

Computing architecture affects both the speed and cost of laser
printers.

CISC (complex instruction set computer) have a much lower

effective speed in an embedded application like a laser printer.

That's because the CISC architecture was designed for computers.

CISC chips are burdened by multi-cycle, micro-coded, complex

instructions - a legacy of 1970s development -- many of which are

not required in embedded applications. Aside from performance, it
can negatively impact the cost of other system components,
including the electronics, power supply and pin count - a
detriment to cost-sensitive embedded applications like laser
printers.

RISC (reduced instruction set computer) architecture was

developed in the 1980s as a simpler, faster, superior alternative to

CISC. It offers easier decoding and pipelining, and typically
executes at least one instruction per clock cycle, as opposed to
CISC, which often does less.

MIPS architecture
Of the current RISC architectures, the MIPS

architecture is the only one in the embedded

systems industry generally available for licensing.
They range from ultra-low-power 32-bit CPU cores
occupying less than a half-millimeter of silicon, to
64-bit dual-core processors running at 1 GHz.
Cores are designed for easy integration into
system-on-a-chip designs, which offer additional
performance advantages in embedded applications,
such as lower power and fewer components for
higher reliability and out-of-the-box functionality.

Example: HP LaserJet 9500

PMC-Sierra is the manufacturer of MIPSbased processors used in Hewlett-Packard
laser printers. PMC-Sierras latest
processor, 64-Bit MIPS RISC Microprocessor
with integrated L2 Cache, is used in the
latest network printers from HP. The
processor features 600MHz operating
frequency, 2 levels of cache:
1st level 16KB 4-way set associative 32-byte
line size Instruction and Data caches,
2nd level 256 KB 4-way set associative 32byte line size,
Also, an L3 external cache (off chip) 512KB8MB direct-mapped, 32-byte line size

Example: HP LaserJet 9500 64-Bit Processor

Will Printers become faster ?

Future generations of workgroup printers
will continue to offer increasingly higher
speeds.

Given the uniquely broad range of

processors being designed by MIPS

licensees, from ultra-low-power 32-bit cores
to 64-bit 1-GHz CPUs, anything is possible.

Thank you
Questions?
Ramiz Bleibel
Anton Petrosyan
Mohamad Ghuneim
Bertha Sierra