Print engine controller for a printhead assembly

1. A print engine controller of a printhead assembly having a plurality of printhead modules, said controller comprising a plurality of integrated circuits interconnected with connecting members placed in cavities formed by adjacently arranged supports individually supporting the integrated circuits, each integrated circuit comprising:

a memory buffer to receive rasterized page data from a computer system;

a page image expander for expanding the page data to retrieve page images;

dithering means for dithering a continuous tone (“contone”) layer over the page data;

a compositor for compositing a black bi-level layer of the contone layer;

rendering means for rendering infra-red tags over the contone layer; and

an output driving the printhead modules to print the composited page data.

2. The print engine controller of claim 1 , wherein the rendering means is configured to encode bi-level IR tag data from the page data.

3. The print engine controller of claim 1 , wherein the page expander is configured to expand a JPEG-compressed contone CMYK layer, a Group 4 Fax-compressed bi-level dither matrix selection map, and a Group 4 Fax-compressed bi-level black layer, all in parallel.

4. The print engine controller of claim 3 , which is configured to generate a fixative layer at each page data dot position wherever there is a need in any C, M, Y, K, or IR channels of page data.

5. The print engine controller of claim 3 , wherein the output facilitates the printing of the bi-level CMYK+IR data through the printhead assembly.

6. The print engine controller of claim 3 , wherein the dithering means is configured to dither the contone CMYK layer using a dither matrix selected by a dither matrix select map.

7. The print engine controller of claim 6 , wherein the compositor is configured to composite the bi-level black layer over a resulting bi-level K layer and add an IR layer to the page data.