Patent · US Expired

System for performing addition and subtraction of signed magnitude floating point binary numbers

US5111421A · kind A · utility

23Cited by
9References
11Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateFeb 26, 1990
Grant dateMay 5, 1992
Priority date
Expiry dateFeb 26, 2010

Classification

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

Abstract

A versatile floating point adder which performs high speed floating point addition or subtraction on operands supplied in a signed magnitude format includes separate exponent and mantissa data paths for processing the exponent fields and mantissa fields of the floating point binary numbers to be added or subtracted. The exponent data path computes the absolute difference between the exponents of the floating point numbers, passes the large exponent, and adjusts the large exponent by an amount needed to normalize the mantissa and to reflect an overflow in the mantissa addition/substration and mantissa rounding operations. The mantissa data path denormalizes one of the input mantissas, adds the two mantissas after the denormalization operation, post-normalizes the resulting mantissa, and rounds the mantissa to the correct precision.

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