Patent · US Expired

Architecture to implement floating point multiply/accumulate operations

US4841467A · kind A · utility

47Cited by
3References
11Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateOct 5, 1987
Grant dateJun 20, 1989
Priority date
Expiry dateOct 5, 2007

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06F2207/3884
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

A multiply/accumulator chip architecture capable of operating at a 20 megahertz system clock rate is designed so as to accept floating point numbers in sign magnitude form, to compute a product of the fractional portions thereof and to convert the fractional result into two's complement form for accumulation with the results of a previous product. This architecture readily permits the computation of vector-type inner product operations in a high speed pipelined fashion. Additionally, leading zero's and leadings one's detection is carried out in a multiply parallel fashion so as to rapidly produce post normalization results from the additive portion of the system. The system is implementable on a single integrated circuit chip in which an array multiplier is present so as to minimize inter-chip delays. The architecture of the present invention provides a high speed floating point multiply and accumulate operation with a short pipeline latency.

Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.