Method and system for performing floating point operations in unnormalized format using a floating point accumulator
US6256655A · kind A · utility
Assignee
Inventors
Key dates
| Filing date | Sep 14, 1998 |
| Grant date | Jul 3, 2001 |
| Priority date | — |
| Expiry date | Sep 14, 2018 |
Classification
- Technology area (CPC G)Physics
- CPC primaryG06F7/49936
- WIPO fieldComputer technology
- WIPO sectorElectrical engineering
Abstract
A method and system for performing floating point operations in unnormalized format using a floating point accumulator. The present invention provides a set of floating point instructions and a floating point accumulator which stores the results of the operations in unnormalized format. Since the present invention operates on and stores floating point numbers in unnormalized format, the normalization step in the implementation of the floating point operations, which is typically required in the prior art, is readily eliminated. The present invention thus provides significant improvements in both time and space efficiency over prior art implementations of floating point operations. In digital signal processing applications, where floating point operations are used extensively for sums of products calculations, the performance improvements afforded by the present invention are further magnified by the elimination of normalization in each of numerous iterations of multiply and add instructions. A method for computing floating point operations and the circuitry used by the method are described herein.
Source: USPTO / EPO open patent data. Objective bibliographic and citation counts.