Patent · US Expired

High-sticky calculation in pipelined fused multiply/add circuitry

US7392273B2 · kind B2 · utility

9Cited by
4References
3Claims
0Family size

Assignee

Inventors

Key dates

Filing dateDec 10, 2003
Grant dateJun 24, 2008
Priority date
Expiry dateAug 22, 2025

Classification

  • Technology area (CPC G)Physics
  • CPC primaryG06F7/5443
  • WIPO fieldComputer technology
  • WIPO sectorElectrical engineering

Abstract

Arithmetic processing circuits in a circuit in a floating point processor having a fused multiply/ADD circuitry. In order to avoid waiting cycles in the normalizer of the floating point arithmetic, control logic calculates in an extremely early state of the overall Multiply/Add processing. Parts of the intermediate add result are significant and have to be selected in the pre-normalizer multiplexer to be fed to the normalizer by counting the leading zero bits (LAB) of the addend in a dedicated circuit right at the beginning of the pipe. LAB is added to the shift amount (SA) that is calculated to align the addend and is then compared with the width of the incrementer. If the sum of (SA+LAB) is larger than the width of the incrementer, which is a constant value, then no significant bits are in the high-part of the intermediate result, and the pre-normalizer multiplexer selects the data from a second predetermined position, otherwise from a first predetermined position.

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